How Do I Handle An Employee Quitting Unexpectedly?

In This Episode

Most of us as business owners have been there. Things are going along great, we finally have what appears to be the right team in place. And then boom! One of your key people comes in and gives their 2-week notice. What’s a boss to do?

Often the initial reaction to a good person resigning is that you want to do whatever it takes to make them stay. The pain of them leaving is almost too much to bear at this point. You know that as the owner it is likely that you’ll have to be the one plugging the gap to make up for what they were doing. Who has time for that? Plus you’ll have to go through the process of finding, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and training someone new. So what’s an owner to do? Well, it depends.

There’s no one right answer to this situation. It really depends on why the person is leaving. We recently had a client where this happened with a key employee who decided to leave so he could make more money. Another client had someone resign because some of the job duties they were given weren’t something they were comfortable doing. Yet another had someone resign because they got an offer from another business.

We provided different guidance for each of these clients because their particular situations were all different. For the one who was leaving to make more money, despite the owners’ desire to try to work something out to pay this person more, we advised them to let the person go. For the one who was leaving due to the job duties going beyond their comfort zone, we advised the owner to go back with a paired down job description that would focus on those things this person was experienced in and liked doing. What do you do when this happens?