When faced with an employee telling you they’re quitting, it’s easy to take it personally. But if you let your emotions take over, a resignation can easily turn into a much bigger problem.

The recruitment process between an employer and employee is a bit like dating. You project your best self to woo them into picking you and then you invest time and energy into strengthening the relationship.

It can take years to build genuine trust and to learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but when it clicks, it’s like magic.

So when someone says it’s just not working out and calls it quits, it can be heartbreaking.

“It can feel like getting dumped,” says Anthony Klotz, Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at UCL School of Management in London, who has studied resignations and accidentally coined the term ‘The Great Resignation’.

“When you’re feeling insecure, emotionally, bad things can happen. You might respond in an unconstructive way. But if you want that employee to have a productive notice period… and share the real reason they’re leaving, instead of the whole ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ thing, how managers and HR respond in those initial resignation moments is really important.”

Don’t let your emotions take over

When an employee leaves – especially if they’re a star player – managers often experience a moment of insecurity, says Klotz.

“Consider how managers respond to the news of an employee leaving, especially a top performer that they’ve invested in personally,” he says.

“Organisations spend so much time and energy training people on the onboarding process, but they overlook the offboarding process. HR professionals and managers should be trained on how to respond when an employee says, ‘I quit.'”

This training could include information on:

The right and wrong way to respond in the moment

For example:

❌  Don’t: Make it about yourself by talking about how disappointed you are or questioning their decision/loyalty.

✅ Do: Thank them for telling you and ask if there’s anything you could do to change their mind. If there isn’t, be respectful of that.

How to loop others into the news

❌  Don’t: Announce the employee’s departure to others before the details are ironed out.
✅ Do: Ask the employee how/when they’d like to share the news with others.

How to interact with them during their notice period

❌  Don’t: Automatically cut them out of projects/meetings simply because they won’t be there to execute the details. They’ll still have valuable information to contribute and will need to pass on their institutional knowledge to others.

✅ Do: Cover your bases from a risk perspective by ensuring that access to confidential information is restricted if they are moving to a competitor (in which case you might consider placing them on gardening leave), but do so in a way that acknowledges their contributions to the company.

How to communicate the news to their colleagues
❌  Don’t: Cause unnecessary panic by mentioning the employee’s departure before you have a plan to redistribute their work.

✅ Do: Reassure employees of your plan and acknowledge the value that the departing employee has added during their tenure.

Employees pay attention to how their peers are treated when they exit an organisation, so make sure managers’ emotions about the situation don’t result in them bad-mouthing the exiting employee or treating them differently.

Klotz says it would be wise to consider enacting formal processes for counter offers to ensure all exiting employees have a consistent experience, and to increase the chance of them deciding to stay or returning in the future.

“It’s a good time to show professionalism and goodwill to the departing employee. When someone says they’re resigning, there can be a lot of negative energy. Show the rest of the team that you have a plan and infuse positive energy.

“Positivity goes a long way. You might be panicking about your top performer leaving, but you can’t project that to the rest of your employees. Tell them, ‘This is a moment that’s going to strengthen us. I have a plan.'”

Prevent turnover contagion

Ensuring managers demonstrate goodwill towards departing employees is key because it can be the thing that prevents ‘turnover contagion’ from taking hold.

“Turnover contagion is when one employee quitting puts the idea of quitting in their co-workers’ minds. When someone quits, it’s a bummer on a few different levels. First of all, their colleagues’ workloads might increase and their job satisfaction might go down because that co-worker was a friend of theirs.

“It can also plant a seed of doubt for some people. They might think, ‘What’s she going to do that’s better than what we’re currently doing in this role?’

“People can only work on goodwill alone for so long.” – Associate Professor, Anthony Klotz, UCL Business School

“In the wake of employees leaving, especially if they’re people with a lot of close relationships, I think it’s critical that HR professionals and managers have one-on-one listening sessions with the remaining employees. And ‘listening’ should be underlined three times. This is a time to hear how the remaining employees are experiencing work.

“It’s not a time for you to say, ‘Kate has left, you must be feeling terrible.’ It’s just checking in and asking questions like, ‘Tell me about how you’re experiencing work right now.’ Because they might then say something like, ‘I know Kate left because she wasn’t happy with her pay, so now I’m thinking about how I don’t feel like I’m paid enough.’ That’s a more honest answer than Kate would give in her exit interview. You can find critical information when you quit talking and just listen.”

Read HRM’s article about how to support employees who remain after their colleagues resign.

Don’t use pay as a long-term solution

The main factor that’s causing employees to jump ship at the moment is money – especially with the current cost-of-living pressures.

“The current economy is making pay salient on employees’ minds,” says Klotz. “Ideally, pay isn’t something employees think about every day because few good things happen when they’re thinking about pay. Most of the time they come to the conclusion that it’s not enough or other people are getting more than them.

“Pay will help you retain some individuals and it may help you hire individuals, but it doesn’t lead to thriving; it doesn’t lead to high performance.”

Rather than throwing more money at someone to prevent them from quitting, think about what you can offer beyond attractive compensation, such as more learning and development, progressive leave policies or flexible work arrangements, such as a four-day work week.

Just don’t take a blanket approach – different things will work for different people.

“Four-day weeks are showing all this promise in terms of making work more sustainable, but there will be some employees who might feel pressured to work harder in that kind of environment, so they’ll leave. Then there will be others who see it as an attraction, and so will leave their existing employer to join a company adopting a four-day week.”

Employers are still in experimentation mode, he says. So, get creative with what you offer people.

“There’s this term in organisational psychology literature called idiosyncratic deals. In HR and compliance, there used to be this thinking that we had to treat everybody exactly the same, otherwise there’s unfairness or a liability threat. 

“That needs to go out the window in a lot of cases. Each employee is different. Their life outside and at work is different. We need to make adjustments and have more bespoke career development plans – and we have the capability to do that now.”

Do use pay as a temporary solution

A key challenge that arises when people quit is the redistribution of their workload.

If the departure of an employee is going to create extra work for those who remain, Klotz says it’s important that you compensate them for the extra work.

“Either say, ‘Until we backfill this person, you’re going to have to take on some extra work, so we’re going to give everyone a 10 per cent bump that will go away once we hire their replacement.’ Or maybe you can’t do that, so instead you add a few extra days of annual leave for them.

“You’re withdrawing from your social goodwill account with those individuals – or their  commitment account. So [think about] how much capital you have with them to make those withdrawals. It depends on the situation, but people can only work on goodwill alone for so long.

“Instead of just saying, ‘Suck it up folks, we’re in a rocky period’, take that [exiting] employee’s salary, or even a portion of it, and split it between the remaining members.”

You might discover that the team can easily absorb that person’s tasks and are happy to do so if they’re compensated for it. This can save you the costs of hiring a new full-time employee, he adds.

Offer realistic job previews

You can help to avoid things getting to the resignation stage in the first place if you practice transparency and authenticity from the get-go.

“We only show our good side when recruiting,” says Klotz. “Companies are like, ‘It’s so wonderful working here.'”

Of course, nothing is great 100 per cent of the time. Candidates know that.

HR and managers need to offer a realistic picture of the role so people know exactly what they’re signing up for. As mentioned in part one of this article, this could also help to curb rates of candidate regret and the wellbeing concerns that come with it.

As HRM has mentioned in the past, there can be a huge amount of value in employers saying, ‘This is what we think you’ll like about the job, but this is an aspect some people struggle with.’

If you’re not upfront with this information, people will seek this information out for themselves, Klotz adds. They might go to Glassdoor or seek out ex-employees to hear why they quit, so it’s best to get a jump on that by offering clear and transparent detail about the realities of your culture.

Another way to prevent resignations from occurring is to make ‘stay interviews’ a key aspect of your engagement plan. Instead of waiting for the exit interview to glean useful information, a stay interview is conducted on an annual or bi-annual basis to learn more about what motivates an employee to stay or to leave. 

You could ask questions such as:

• What’s something you’re learning at the moment?
• What gets you most excited about coming to work each day?
• If I could change one thing about your experience at work, what would that be?
• When was the last time you thought about quitting and why?
• What’s a consistent barrier in your work day?
• What would lure you to a different company?

Most importantly, HR can help to take the sting out of resignations by reminding managers that no one is staying with a company for life anymore. The average person will have 12 jobs in their lifetime. Employers don’t own people’s careers. 

However, if they have a positive exit experience, they’re more likely to become champions for your business in the future, or even rejoin you at a later stage in their career.

Read part one of this interview with Associate Professor Anthony Klotz, ‘How to quit your job’.

Ensure your team is thinking and acting strategically at every stage of the employment lifecycle with this short course from AHRI.