Don’t waste the space between goodbye and hello
The phrase you can't rehire your way out of this came to me after hearing about an organization facing yet another departure. It wasn't that the organization wouldn't need to hire someone new. But hearing about another vacancy made me wonder whether filling the position was enough.
People leave organizations for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes those reasons have very little to do with the organization itself. People relocate, their lives change, they pursue new opportunities, or a role simply stops fitting what they need. And when people leave, the immediate response is usually operational. The job gets posted, interviews happen, someone new is hired, and there is a sense of relief when the position is finally filled. That response makes sense. The work has to be covered, relationships need to transition, and someone needs to start thinking about recruitment.
But at what point does another departure become an invitation to look beyond the person leaving, and ask what people are repeatedly experiencing inside the organization?
When departures start happening repeatedly, filling the position may solve the vacancy without addressing the pattern. For this Field Note, I'm thinking specifically about voluntary departures, and what organizations can learn when those departures begin to accumulate.
Turnover is information
One resignation does not necessarily mean something is wrong with an organization. But it does give us information. The temptation is to explain each departure individually. This person wanted more money. That person found a better opportunity. Someone else was ready for something new. Any of those explanations may be true, but focusing only on individual reasons can make it harder to recognize when individual departures are becoming an organizational pattern.
Organizational researchers use the term collective turnover to examine employee departures at the level of a team, work unit, or organization rather than treating each departure solely as an isolated event (Hausknecht, 2017). Context-emergent turnover theory further suggests that collective turnover involves the loss of human capital from a unit, including employees’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (Nyberg & Ployhart, 2013). A large meta-analysis drawing on 2,149 effect sizes from 159 studies across 150 articles found that collective turnover is generally associated with lower organizational performance, while also showing that the relationship is more complex than simply equating more turnover to mean worse performance” (Hancock et al., 2017). Who leaves matters. What they carried matters. The organization's ability to absorb the loss matters. This is especially important for smaller organizations, where a relatively small number of departures can reshape how the work happens.
Headcount only tells part of the story
When someone leaves, their position becomes vacant. What is harder to see is everything else that may leave with them. They may carry years of institutional knowledge about why a process works the way it does. They may hold trusted relationships with participants, community members, funders, or partners. They may have specialized expertise that appears as a few bullet points in a job description but took years to develop. They may even be the person everyone quietly goes to when they need context, advice, or help navigating the organization. Those things are difficult to capture on an organizational chart, and they are not automatically restored when someone new accepts the position.
This is one reason I think smaller organizations should be particularly thoughtful about how they understand turnover. Losing three people from an organization of eight is not simply three vacancies. Depending on who those people were and what they held, the organization may have experienced a significant shift in its knowledge, relationships, capacity, and ability to deliver its work.
So, alongside asking how quickly a position can be filled, it is worth asking another question: What exactly did we lose when this person left?
One departure can change the experience of staying
Turnover does not only affect the people who leave. It can also change the organizational conditions experienced by the people who remain. Research on turnover contagion has explored how one person's departure can influence coworkers' attitudes, job search behaviors, and decisions about whether they want to stay. This does not mean that one resignation inevitably causes another. It means that departures happen within a system of relationships, responsibilities, and shared experiences.
When someone leaves, their workload may be distributed among the remaining team. A colleague may lose a trusted thought partner. Relationships with participants or partners may need to be rebuilt. When a respected supervisor or longtime employee leaves, people may begin asking their own questions about the organization and their future within it. The departure itself can change the conditions of work.
That is why only one resignation may require recruitment but a pattern of resignations requires curiosity.
The signals often come before the resignation
Organizations usually become very interested in someone's experience once that person decides to leave. We conduct an exit interview, ask what could have been different, and try to understand why they are going. But the resignation may not be the first time the organization received that information. There may have been conversations about workload in supervision. Staff may have repeatedly asked for clearer decision making. People may have struggled to use their time off because there was no one available to cover their responsibilities. A team may have raised the same operational challenge several times without resolution. Employees may have asked about opportunities for growth and received unclear answers. Engagement surveys may have pointed to concerns that never quite became priorities.
Individually, these moments may not seem significant. Taken together, they can begin to tell a story about what it feels like to work within the organization. This is the progression I keep coming back to:
People experience organizational conditions….They send signals about those conditions…. Repeated departures can become a pattern.
The responsibility of the organization is to notice.
Before you fill the vacancy
Vacancies create urgency, especially when teams are already stretched. But the space between someone leaving and someone new arriving is a chance to look beyond the vacancy. Before reposting the same job description, consider what the person was actually being asked to do, whether the workload was sustainable, and what the people who remain are experiencing.
Instead of only asking, What do we need in the next person? ask: What would need to be different for the next person to thrive here?Sometimes the answer is still to hire. Other times, the role may need to be redesigned, responsibilities may need to shift, or a program may need to pause long enough for the organization to understand what is actually sustainable.
Not every resignation signals an organizational problem, but repeated departures can reveal patterns worth examining. Pay attention to what has happened over time, listen to the people who remain, and look for recurring issues across roles, teams, and programs. Hiring addresses the vacancy. Organizational learning addresses the pattern.
A question to carry with you
If you hired the perfect person tomorrow, what organizational conditions would they still inherit?
____________
References
Hancock, J. I., Allen, D. G., Bosco, F. A., McDaniel, K. R., & Pierce, C. A. (2017). Collective turnover: An expanded meta-analytic exploration and comparison. Human Resource Management Review, 27(1), 61–86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2016.06.003
Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). Collective turnover. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 527–544. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-032516-113139
Nyberg, A. J., & Ployhart, R. E. (2013). Context-emergent turnover (CET) theory: A theory of collective turnover. Academy of Management Review, 38(1), 109–131. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2011.0201
