It’s the new year: a time for new goals, new ideas, and new beginnings, both for us and for our team members.
And unfortunately, for our team members, that sometimes means an abrupt departure from our company.
The new year can sometimes result in a wave of people quitting without any warning…leaving us and our plans for the new year completely screwed.
As much as we want to support our team members in finding the situation that’s right for them—as much as we want them to flourish and thrive their careers—it’s hard to figure out what to do when an employee quits suddenly.
When someone leaves our teams, especially when they were part of our A team, it can really throw us for a loop. So today, I want to talk about what to do when an employee quits suddenly and how to tackle damage control so that someone leaving doesn’t throw off your whole business.
Like I said, this is something that happens a lot at the beginning of a year or at the end. So if you are seeing a lot of shifts, try not to take it too personally! There are always opportunities to reflect on what we can do differently, but this doesn’t automatically indicate that your business is failing or that you’re a bad manager. Not at all.
So while we don’t need to panic and overhaul everything, we do want to do some specific things to make sure that we can move forward in the easiest way possible without throwing off the vibe of our team, because our team is always looking to us to see how we’re going to handle the situation, especially a stressful one.
Here’s what to do when an employee quits suddenly…
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Stop and Assess
When deciding what to do when an employee quits suddenly, the first step is to stop and assess the situation as a whole.
Did that person give you any notice? Depending on the answer to that question, you can ask them to put together a handoff plan (including an update on their current projects), or you might have to figure out alone.
Let’s say the person does give you a few weeks’ notice. In that case, I’d sit down with them at the beginning of those two weeks and make a plan, knowing that if someone gives you two weeks’ notice, you’re only going to get one week of productivity out of them.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: that last week they’re with us, they’re really just waiting for time to pass. I’m sorry to say it, but I wouldn’t assume you’re going to get productivity out of them up until the last second.
Instead, I recommend looking at however much notice they give you and cutting that in half to calculate how much time you have to utilize their remaining productivity.
That way, we can accurately assess what we need to prioritize for that departing team member in order to make that transition as smooth and simple as we can. Usually, that looks like asking them to wrap up any loose ends left with their current projects—not assigning them new work.
That means gathering and organizing all their documents, getting updates on their open projects, receiving the active status of things, and asking them to close the loop with any clients. We want to be winding down, not trying to squeeze more new work out of them,
On the other hand, if they give you no notice, I would start by figuring out what they working on, where they were storing their documents, who their clients were, etcetera. You need all that information to figure out how to hand their responsibilities off, regardless of whether they’re there to help you out.
Thoughtfully Reassign
Once you have a sense of what needs to be handed off, the second part of figuring out what to do when an employee quits suddenly is to thoughtfully assign the work to the right person.
You as the manager do not have to tackle all of it yourself. While deciding what to do when an employee quits suddenly, a lot of business owners or managers that I talk to feel that everyone else is already at max capacity, so they have to take those abandoned responsibilities on themselves. But all that does is leave the manager freaking out, because not only do they already have a mostly full plate, they now have to try and do a new job when they don’t have skills in that area.
When deciding what to do when an employee quits suddenly, if we look at the full scope of the work and look at who really is the right person to take that on, we’ll often find that person is not us. There might be a few things for us to take over, but there also might be a few things for other team members, especially if a certain task is in someone’s wheelhouse.
For example, let’s say someone has a related role or they’ve been wanting to build a skill in the area that the person who quit was working on. That presents a fantastic opportunity to delegate that abandoned task to them.
A lot of times when someone quits a team, it’s a really good opportunity for another team member who might actually want to take more on.
Now, we don’t want to assume—we don’t want to just throw a second job on someone—but while figuring out what to do when an employee quits suddenly, we can sit down and look at another employee’s workload and say, “Hey, is this realistic for you with your current workload? What would you feel comfortable taking on?
If you do that, I think you’ll be surprised how positively people respond.
Consider How To Improve
Now, when deciding what to do when an employee quits suddenly, we don’t want to assume someone left because our business is terrible or because we’re a bad manager or anything like that. However, we do want to take that opportunity to reflect on what we could have done differently. We want to look at whether there were any signs we might have missed, if there was any feedback that they gave us that we never took action on, etc.
Sometimes managers like to do exit interviews; however, I have mixed feelings about those. They’re not on my list of what to do when an employee quits suddenly because I don’t think people give the most honest feedback all the time, because they often leave over something they didn’t like, but they don’t want to tell you about it.
Instead, I think it could be really helpful to go over the time you were with that employee and think about some of the things that they shared, the level of their enthusiasm on projects, if they came to you a few times to express uncertainty or doubt around certain things, etc. just so you can be more attuned to the feedback that your team members give you in the future.
Struggling With Damage Control? Give Me a Call!
So this is my list of what to do when an employee quits suddenly.
I know it’s terrible. I know the rug just got pulled out from under you. I know it creates more work. I know it is a really, really hard situation, but when we do these three things, we can mitigate that a little bit.
If you need support with what to do when an employee quits suddenly, and if you want to make sure you set things up to make someone leaving your team as low-impact as possible, you’re going to want the Ops Playbook. And in the meantime, if you’ve just had someone quit out of nowhere and you need immediate help with cranking out a plan, schedule an SOS call with me!
During that hour-long call, we will put together a game plan for handing off work, for figuring out what’s left open that needs closing, and for figuring out those top priorities that you really need to get done.
Schedule that call, and we can make sure that this crisis is taken care of right away.
WORK WITH LIA:
Book an SOS call with me: https://www.liagarvin.com/sos
Get your very own Ops Playbook, tailored to YOUR business and team, to simplify your team ops: https://www.liagarvin.com/playbook
Want a checklist of things you can do THIS week to become a better manager (and make your job easier)? Check out my Thriving Team Checklist for a list of quick actions you can take right away with your team: https://www.liagarvin.com/checklist
Book a FREE Scale-up strategy call to for strategies to scale your team and get time back for yourself: calendly.com/liagarvin/scaleup-strategy?back=1&month=2023-08
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