Good employees are not exceptional performers. They’re reliable, competent people who do their jobs well. They meet deadlines. They work effectively with others. They don’t require constant management. They’re the organizational middle, the 60-70% of employees who make organizations function.
Organizations lose these people constantly and usually don’t notice until exit interviews. By then it’s too late. The employee has mentally departed months earlier. The resignation is paperwork confirming a decision already made.
Good employees don’t quit because of single catastrophic failures. They quit because of accumulated small failures that erode the employment relationship. Each failure is minor. Individually they’re forgettable. Collectively they’re unforgivable.
Organizations focus on retention programs, compensation adjustments, and culture initiatives. These don’t address the actual problem. Good employees leave because hundreds of small interactions taught them the organization doesn’t value their contribution. No retention program fixes that.
What Defines a Good Employee
Good employees are distinguished not by exceptional performance but by reliable competence and minimal maintenance cost.
Consistent Performance Above Minimum
Good employees consistently perform above minimum acceptable standards. Not exceptional. Not transformative. Solidly above the line.
They deliver work on time. They produce acceptable quality. They handle their responsibilities without constant supervision. They’re not stars but they’re dependable.
This reliability is valuable. Organizations can plan around it. Managers don’t worry about their output. Peers trust them to handle their part of shared work.
The value is invisible until it’s gone. When a good employee leaves, their replacement is often worse. The manager discovers how much they relied on that person’s consistent delivery.
Self-Sufficient Operation
Good employees solve problems without escalation. They handle routine obstacles independently. They don’t require hand-holding or constant direction.
A good employee encounters a blocked dependency and works around it or escalates appropriately. An average employee waits for someone to unblock them. The good employee’s self-sufficiency saves management overhead.
This autonomy makes them cheap to manage. They require periodic check-ins, not constant attention. Managers can focus elsewhere knowing the good employee will handle their domain.
Organizations undervalue this until they replace a good employee with someone requiring daily direction. Suddenly they realize the management cost difference.
Positive Team Impact
Good employees make teams function better. They share knowledge. They help struggling peers. They don’t create drama. They participate constructively in discussions.
They’re not team leaders. They’re not culture carriers. They’re just reliably positive contributors to team dynamics. Teams with higher concentrations of good employees function more smoothly.
When good employees leave, team dynamics degrade. Not catastrophically. Just slightly worse. More friction. Less knowledge sharing. Slightly more tension. The effect is subtle but cumulative.
Reasonable Expectations
Good employees have calibrated expectations. They understand what the organization can realistically provide. They don’t expect rapid advancement, exceptional compensation, or perfect conditions.
They want fairness, reasonable workload, and competent management. Their bar is not high. It’s achievable. Organizations that can’t clear this bar have serious problems.
When good employees quit, it’s not because they expected too much. It’s because the organization failed to meet reasonable expectations.
The Accumulation Pattern
Good employees don’t quit suddenly. They quit gradually through accumulated disappointments. Each incident is small. The pattern is decisive.
The First Disappointment Teaches Caution
The first significant disappointment changes the relationship. The promised project gets canceled. The raise doesn’t come through. The promotion goes to someone less qualified.
The employee absorbs this. Maybe it’s a one-time thing. Maybe next time will be different. They adjust their expectations downward and continue.
But they’re watching now. The organization went from assumed good faith to provisional trust. Future disappointments hit differently because the baseline shifted.
The Second Disappointment Establishes Pattern
The second similar disappointment within a reasonable timeframe establishes a pattern. The organization promised professional development funding and didn’t deliver. Again. The manager committed to reducing workload and didn’t follow through. Again.
The employee recognizes this isn’t random variance. This is how the organization operates. Promises are aspirational, not commitments. Plans are suggestions, not schedules. Stated priorities are rhetorical, not actual.
This recognition is permanent. You can’t unknow that the organization doesn’t follow through. Every future promise is evaluated against this pattern.
Subsequent Disappointments Compound
After pattern establishment, each subsequent disappointment compounds rather than adding linearly. The third unfulfilled commitment isn’t just one more incident. It’s confirmation the pattern is durable.
The frustration isn’t about the individual incident anymore. It’s about the meta-pattern. The organization keeps demonstrating it doesn’t do what it says. Each new instance reinforces the conclusion.
By the fifth or sixth disappointment, the employee stops being disappointed. They expect failure. They’re not hurt anymore. They’re calculating exit timing.
The Breaking Point Is Arbitrary
The final incident that triggers resignation is rarely the most significant. It’s often trivial. The employee quits over a scheduling conflict or a minor policy change.
Organizations focus on this trigger event. “They quit because we changed the remote work policy.” This misses the context. The policy change was incident number fifty in a long accumulation. It just happened to be the one where the employee decided to act.
Fixing the trigger incident wouldn’t have prevented departure. The resignation decision was made months earlier through accumulated frustrations. The trigger just provided timing.
The Specific Failures That Accumulate
Certain categories of failure appear repeatedly in good employee departure patterns. These failures are individually minor but collectively decisive.
Broken Feedback Loops
Good employees want to know how they’re doing. Not constant validation. Periodic calibration that their work meets expectations and where they should improve.
Organizations fail at this consistently. Managers don’t provide regular feedback. Performance reviews are rushed formalities. Good work goes unacknowledged. Problems don’t get surfaced until they’re serious.
The good employee works in an information vacuum. They don’t know if they’re meeting expectations. They don’t know what to improve. They don’t know if their contributions matter.
This creates anxiety and frustration. They’re performing blind. The uncertainty is exhausting. Eventually they leave for environments with functional feedback.
Arbitrary Process Changes
Organizations change processes constantly. New approval workflows. Different status reporting. Changed meeting structures. Each change is individually justified.
Good employees experience this as arbitrary disruption. The process worked. Now it doesn’t. The new process doesn’t clearly improve anything. It just requires learning new procedures and attending new meetings.
Each process change imposes costs without visible benefits. The accumulated cost is significant. The employee spends substantial time adapting to process churn rather than doing actual work.
After enough process changes that don’t improve anything, good employees conclude the organization changes things to appear active rather than to improve effectiveness. This conclusion is demoralizing.
Invisible Contributions
Good employees do substantial work that’s organizationally invisible. They maintain systems. They help onboard new hires. They document processes. They fix things before they break.
This work is valuable but untracked. It doesn’t appear in performance reviews. It doesn’t get recognized in team meetings. It doesn’t affect compensation.
The good employee does it anyway because it needs doing. But when their visible work gets the same recognition as their visible-plus-invisible work, they learn invisible contribution doesn’t matter.
Eventually they stop doing invisible work. Or they leave to find organizations that notice total contribution.
Competence Not Rewarded
Good employees expect competence to correlate with reward. Not perfectly. But directionally. People who do better work should advance faster and earn more.
Organizations routinely violate this. Politics, tenure, and visibility determine advancement more than competence. The good employee watches less competent peers get promoted. They watch poor performers get the same raises they get.
Each instance teaches them that competence doesn’t matter as much as other factors. This is demoralizing for people whose value proposition is reliable competence.
They leave to find organizations where being good at the work actually matters.
Workload Inequity
Good employees get assigned more work because they’re reliable. The manager knows they’ll deliver. Weaker performers get easier assignments because the manager doesn’t trust them with complex work.
This creates workload inequity. The good employee has harder work, more work, and tighter deadlines. The weak performer has simpler work and more slack. Both get evaluated as “meeting expectations.”
The good employee recognizes the reward for competence is punishment. They get harder work without additional compensation or recognition. The rational response is to reduce competence to avoid additional burden.
Most good employees can’t sustain deliberate incompetence. It violates their identity. They leave instead.
Promises Without Follow-Through
Managers make promises they don’t keep. “We’ll revisit your title next quarter.” “I’ll get you on that project.” “We’re working on a compensation adjustment.”
The first broken promise gets excused. The manager was busy. Priorities shifted. It’ll happen next time.
The third broken promise establishes that promises are verbal placeholders, not commitments. The manager says things to end conversations, not because they’ll deliver.
Once a good employee recognizes their manager’s promises are unreliable, the relationship is functionally over. They stop believing anything they’re told. They’re just waiting for exit opportunity.
Management Inconsistency
Good employees want consistent management. Not perfect. Just predictable. They want to understand what matters and have it stay relatively stable.
Organizations deliver the opposite. New manager with different priorities. Same manager with shifting focus. Reorganization that changes reporting structure. Each change resets what matters.
The good employee adapts to one manager’s preferences. New manager arrives with different preferences. The work that was valued is now wrong. The skills that mattered are now irrelevant.
After multiple management changes, good employees stop investing in manager-specific adaptation. They do generic acceptable work and disengage from manager relationships. Eventually they leave.
Recognition Asymmetry
Good employees notice recognition patterns. Certain types of work get praised. Certain people get acknowledged. Certain contributions get visibility.
They notice their work rarely appears in these categories. The project they delivered gets attributed to the team. The problem they solved goes unmentioned. The extra work they did is invisible.
Meanwhile, peers get recognized for work the good employee knows wasn’t that impressive. Visibility gets rewarded more than substance. Politics determines recognition more than contribution.
Each instance of recognition asymmetry teaches that doing good work matters less than being visible. Good employees who can’t or won’t play visibility games eventually leave.
Policy Applied Selectively
Organizations have policies. Remote work guidelines. Expense approval limits. PTO procedures. Equipment requests. The policies nominally apply to everyone.
In practice, they apply selectively. Some people get exceptions. Some managers enforce strictly while others ignore policies. The stated rules don’t predict actual outcomes.
Good employees who follow policies watch others violate them without consequences. They learn that policy compliance is optional if you have the right relationships or status.
This breeds cynicism. If rules don’t apply consistently, they’re not rules. They’re suggestions enforced against people without power to resist them. This recognition is corrosive.
Development Opportunities Go Elsewhere
Good employees want to develop skills. Not aggressively. Just steady growth. Conference attendance. Training budget. Challenging projects. Mentorship.
Organizations give these to favorites. The manager’s preferred employee gets conference approval. The politically connected person gets the interesting project. The charismatic performer gets executive mentorship.
The good employee requests similar opportunities and gets declined. Budget constraints. Timing issues. Maybe next quarter. They watch others get approved for identical requests.
This teaches them they’re not in the favored group. Development resources go to people the organization values. The organization doesn’t value them enough to invest in their growth.
Eventually they find organizations that will invest in them.
Why Organizations Don’t See This Coming
Good employee departures surprise organizations because the accumulation is invisible and the employee hides frustration until exit.
Each Incident Seems Minor
The manager who broke a promise doesn’t think about it afterward. It was one missed commitment among dozens of daily interactions. Not significant.
The good employee remembers it as instance number seven in the pattern. Significant.
The asymmetry means the manager doesn’t know they’re accumulating strikes. Each incident seems like isolated minor friction. The pattern is invisible to them.
By the time the employee resigns, the manager has forgotten most of the incidents that led to the decision.
Good Employees Don’t Complain Loudly
Good employees are low-maintenance. They don’t escalate problems aggressively. They don’t complain constantly. They handle frustration internally.
This makes them easy to ignore. The squeaky wheel gets attention. Good employees aren’t squeaky. Managers focus on louder, more demanding employees while good employees silently accumulate grievances.
When the good employee finally surfaces frustration, it’s in an exit interview. Too late for intervention.
Exit Is Planned Quietly
Good employees plan departure carefully. They don’t announce they’re job searching. They don’t signal discontent obviously. They maintain professional performance while interviewing.
The organization sees someone performing acceptably. They don’t see someone mentally checked out and actively interviewing. The visible behavior doesn’t predict imminent departure.
The resignation appears sudden. In reality, it was planned for months.
Feedback Mechanisms Don’t Capture Accumulation
Engagement surveys ask about current state, not trajectory. “Are you satisfied with your manager?” Good employees answer neutrally. They’re not actively satisfied or dissatisfied. The survey doesn’t capture that satisfaction has declined from 7/10 to 4/10 over two years.
The organization sees stable engagement scores and concludes everything is fine. The stability masks steady decline toward resignation threshold.
By the time scores drop enough to trigger concern, the good employee has already accepted another offer.
Attribution to External Factors
When good employees quit, organizations attribute it to factors they don’t control. Better compensation elsewhere. Career change. Family circumstances. External recruitment.
These explanations externalize responsibility. The organization couldn’t prevent departure because the cause was external. This avoids examining internal factors.
In reality, external opportunities are always available. The question is why the good employee chose to pursue them. The answer is usually accumulated internal failures made external options attractive by comparison.
Replacement Seems Easy
Good employees are replaceable by definition. They’re not exceptional. Their work is competent but not unique. Hiring another good employee seems straightforward.
This makes retention seem optional. Why invest in fixing relationship problems when you can recruit a replacement?
The calculation misses several costs. Recruiting takes time. Onboarding takes time. The new employee may be worse. Institutional knowledge is lost. Team dynamics suffer. The cumulative cost is substantial.
But these costs are diffuse. The immediate calculation is: job posted, candidate hired, replacement working. Seems fine.
The Compounding Organizational Cost
Losing one good employee is manageable. Losing good employees continuously creates compounding costs.
Institutional Knowledge Erosion
Good employees accumulate institutional knowledge. They understand how systems work. They know organizational history. They have relationships across teams.
Each departing good employee takes knowledge the organization needs. The replacement doesn’t have it. The knowledge must be relearned or remains lost.
At scale, this produces organizational amnesia. Nobody knows why things work the way they do. Nobody remembers previous attempts and failures. The organization makes the same mistakes repeatedly.
Team Stability Degradation
Teams perform better with stable membership. They develop working relationships, communication patterns, and shared context. Good employees provide this stability.
High good-employee turnover prevents team stability. By the time the team develops effective dynamics, someone leaves and the team reforms around new membership.
Perpetually reforming teams perform worse than stable teams. The organization pays continuous reformation costs rather than benefiting from stable high performance.
Management Overhead Increase
Good employees require minimal management. Losing them and replacing with average or below-average employees increases management overhead.
The manager who spent 10% of time managing the good employee now spends 25% managing their replacement. Multiply across multiple departures and the manager’s capacity becomes consumed by increased supervision requirements.
This reduces manager capacity for strategic work, team development, and handling actual problems. The manager becomes a full-time supervisor rather than a leader.
Peer Burden Increase
When good employees leave, their work doesn’t disappear. It gets distributed to remaining employees. Other good employees absorb it because they’re capable and reliable.
This increases their workload, making them more likely to leave. Each good employee departure increases the burden on remaining good employees, accelerating their departure. The effect cascades.
Organizations experience this as sudden waves of resignation. It looks random. It’s contagion. Each departure increases probability of subsequent departures.
Quality Baseline Decline
Good employees define the quality baseline. When the organization is primarily good employees, acceptable work quality is relatively high. When good employees leave and get replaced with weaker performers, the baseline drops.
This happens gradually. Each individual replacement is minor. Over two years of 30% annual good-employee turnover, the composition shifts substantially. The organization’s average capability declines measurably.
The organization often doesn’t notice until quality problems become visible externally. By then, the capability loss is significant and difficult to reverse.
Recruitment Difficulty
Good employees refer good employees. Their networks include competent, reliable people. When they leave, recruitment loses access to their networks.
The organization must recruit through other channels. The candidate quality distribution shifts downward. Hiring good employees becomes harder because the internal networks that attracted them are gone.
This creates a downward spiral. Losing good employees makes recruiting good employees harder, which means new hires are weaker, which creates more turnover, which makes recruiting harder.
Cultural Deterioration
Good employees often carry organizational culture. They embody desired values. They model appropriate behavior. They maintain standards.
When they leave en masse, cultural carriers disappear. The organization is staffed by people who weren’t selected for culture fit or who don’t exemplify cultural values.
Culture deteriorates not through active destruction but through attrition of the people who maintained it. The organization claims the same values but fewer people embody them.
What Actually Causes Good Employees to Stay
Good employees stay when the employment relationship remains net positive through accumulated small successes, not absence of failures.
Consistent Small Acknowledgments
Good employees don’t need grand recognition. They need periodic acknowledgment that their work matters and is noticed. “Good job on that delivery.” “Thanks for handling that issue.” “Your work made this possible.”
These acknowledgments are cheap. They cost nothing but attention. Accumulated over time, they create a reservoir of goodwill that buffers against inevitable frustrations.
Organizations that provide consistent small acknowledgments retain good employees longer. Not because the acknowledgments fix structural problems but because they demonstrate the employee’s contribution is valued.
Promises Kept More Often Than Broken
Good employees don’t expect perfection. They expect integrity. When managers make commitments, they should keep them more often than they break them.
This sets a low bar. 70% follow-through is probably sufficient. But many organizations can’t clear it. Promises are cheap and managers make them casually without tracking whether they deliver.
Organizations that track managerial commitments and enforce follow-through retain good employees. The employees learn that promises are real, not rhetorical.
Fair Application of Policy
Good employees don’t need policies to favor them. They need policies applied consistently. If remote work requires VP approval, it should require VP approval for everyone. If expenses need receipts, everyone should need receipts.
Consistent policy application is procedurally just. Good employees value procedural justice highly. They’ll accept policies they disagree with if applied fairly. They won’t accept arbitrary application even of reasonable policies.
Organizations that enforce consistent policy application retain good employees by creating environments that feel fair.
Workload Proportional to Compensation
Good employees accept that high performers might do more work for more pay. They don’t accept doing more work for the same pay because they’re reliable.
Workload should be roughly proportional to compensation and seniority. If the good employee consistently handles more complex work than peers at the same level, they should be promoted or compensated differently.
Organizations that calibrate workload to compensation retain good employees. Organizations that exploit reliability without compensation eventually lose reliable people.
Development Resources Available
Good employees want to grow. Not dramatically. Just steadily. Providing modest development resources, conference attendance, training budget, skill development time, retains them.
These resources are cheap relative to replacement costs. A $2000 training budget and 40 hours of development time per year is negligible cost. It’s often sufficient to keep a good employee from leaving.
Organizations that provide development resources signal investment in employee growth. Good employees reciprocate with loyalty.
Management Stability
Good employees perform better with stable management. They develop relationships with their managers. They calibrate to manager expectations. They build trust over time.
Management churn destroys this. Each new manager resets the relationship. Good employees get exhausted by continuous adaptation to new management.
Organizations that provide management stability retain good employees by eliminating adaptation overhead.
Reasonable Path to Advancement
Good employees don’t need rapid advancement. They need to see a path. If they perform well and develop skills, advancement should be possible within reasonable timeframes.
This doesn’t mean guaranteed promotion. It means visible examples of people advancing through competent performance, not just through politics or tenure.
Organizations where advancement seems achievable through good performance retain good employees. Organizations where advancement seems arbitrary or impossible lose them.
The Retention Paradox
Organizations invest more in retaining high performers and less in retaining good employees. This is backwards in terms of cost-effectiveness.
High performers are expensive to retain. They have many external options. They command premium compensation. They require excellent management and high autonomy. Retention costs are high.
Good employees are cheap to retain. They want fair treatment, reasonable workload, and basic recognition. Their requirements are achievable. Retention costs are low.
The return on retention investment is likely higher for good employees. Small investments yield large retention improvements. Organizations get better retention per dollar spent.
Instead, organizations focus retention effort on high performers who are expensive to keep and good employees who are cheap to replace. This is economically backwards.
The explanation is status. High performers are prestigious. Losing them feels significant. Good employees are unremarkable. Losing them feels acceptable.
Organizations optimize for what feels significant rather than what’s economically rational. They lose good employees continuously while investing heavily in retaining stars.
The result is organizational compositions increasingly bifurcated. A few high performers receiving disproportionate investment and attention, and a shifting population of replaceable workers receiving minimal investment.
Good employees recognize this. They see they’re in the replaceable category. They act accordingly by treating the organization as replaceable.
What Organizations Should Do But Won’t
The interventions that would retain good employees are known and cheap. Organizations don’t implement them because they require changing how managers operate.
Make Managers Track Commitments
Require managers to track commitments made to reports. Weekly review of commitments. Explicit follow-up on promises. Accountability for follow-through rates.
This would dramatically reduce broken-promise accumulation. Good employees would learn manager promises are real. Trust would improve.
Organizations won’t do this because it exposes poor managers and requires management discipline most organizations can’t enforce.
Require Regular Feedback Delivery
Mandate monthly one-on-ones with structured feedback. What’s going well. What needs improvement. How employee is tracking against expectations. Simple, consistent, documented.
This would eliminate the information vacuum good employees operate in. They’d know where they stand. Anxiety would decrease. Performance would improve.
Organizations won’t do this because many managers are bad at feedback and avoiding it is easier than enforcing quality standards.
Audit Recognition Patterns
Track who gets recognized and for what. Identify asymmetries. Ensure good work gets acknowledged regardless of employee visibility or political skill.
This would reduce recognition inequality. Good employees would see their work matters. Engagement would improve.
Organizations won’t do this because recognition often flows to favorites and making it systematic removes managerial discretion.
Enforce Policy Consistently
Apply policies uniformly regardless of employee status or managerial preference. Track exceptions. Require justification for special treatment.
This would create procedural justice. Good employees would trust the system is fair. Cynicism would decrease.
Organizations won’t do this because selective policy application is how managers reward favorites and punish others. Consistency removes this lever.
Calibrate Workload Across Employees
Track workload distribution. Ensure reliable employees aren’t systematically overloaded. Adjust assignments to balance work more fairly.
This would prevent exploitation of good employees. They’d see reliability isn’t punished with additional burden. Resentment would decrease.
Organizations won’t do this because using reliable employees to absorb extra work is how managers handle uneven capability. Rebalancing requires confronting weak performers or requesting more headcount.
Fund Development Systematically
Allocate development budgets based on tenure and performance, not manager discretion. Make training, conferences, and skill development accessible to good performers, not just stars.
This would signal investment in good employees. They’d see the organization values their growth. Loyalty would increase.
Organizations won’t do this because development resources are political currency. Systematic allocation removes this from managerial control.
Why Good Employees Stop Caring
Before good employees quit, they stop caring. The transition from engaged to detached precedes resignation by months.
The transition happens when accumulated disappointments exceed accumulated satisfactions. The employee calculates they’re investing more in the organization than the organization invests in them.
This calculation is not formal. It’s emotional. But it’s decisive. Once the employee concludes the relationship is net-negative, psychological withdrawal begins.
They stop volunteering for extra work. They stop sharing ideas. They stop caring about outcomes beyond their immediate responsibilities. They do what’s required and nothing more.
Organizations often don’t notice this transition. The good employee still performs adequately. They meet deadlines. They attend meetings. The visible behavior remains acceptable.
What’s invisible is the discretionary effort disappearance. The good employee used to do substantial work beyond requirements. That work stopped. The organization doesn’t notice because it was invisible to begin with.
The employee is now performing to the minimum standard that avoids consequences. They’re working for paycheck, not mission. They’re physically present but psychologically departed.
This state can persist for months. The employee is job searching but selective. They’re waiting for the right opportunity. Meanwhile, they’re providing minimum acceptable performance and nothing more.
When they resign, the organization thinks it’s sudden. The employee left months ago. The resignation just makes it official.
The Exit Interview Problem
Organizations conduct exit interviews to understand why good employees leave. The exit interview is too late and the employee has no incentive to be honest.
By exit interview time, the employee wants to preserve relationships and references. Honesty creates awkwardness. The safe response is neutral explanations. “Career growth opportunity.” “Better compensation.” “Shorter commute.”
The organization hears these safe answers and concludes the departure was inevitable. External factors pulled the employee away. Nothing the organization could have prevented.
This misses that the employee is being polite. The real reasons involve broken promises, unfair treatment, workload inequity, and management failures. The employee won’t say this because it creates conflict and provides no benefit.
The data collected in exit interviews is systematically misleading. Organizations make retention decisions based on sanitized explanations rather than actual causes. Interventions target wrong problems.
Effective exit data collection would happen before the employee resigns. Monthly pulse surveys that track satisfaction trajectory. Stay interviews with good performers asking what would make them leave. Proactive identification of accumulating frustrations.
Organizations don’t do this because it requires asking uncomfortable questions while employees have leverage. Easier to wait until exit interview when the employee wants to leave gracefully.
The result is organizations systematically ignorant of why good employees actually leave. They address proximate causes mentioned in exit interviews while missing the accumulated failures that drove the decision.
The Replaceable Fallacy
Organizations treat good employees as replaceable because individually they are. The collective replacement cost is vastly higher than individual replacement cost.
Replacing one good employee is straightforward. Post job. Interview candidates. Hire someone acceptable. Train them. After three months, they’re functional.
The costs are bounded. Recruiting fees. Onboarding time. Short-term productivity gap. Manageable.
Replacing 30% of good employees annually is catastrophic. The organization is permanently in transition. Teams never stabilize. Institutional knowledge continuously erodes. Management capacity is consumed by onboarding. Quality declines.
The costs compound. Each replacement increases burden on remaining employees. Training overhead scales with turnover. Knowledge loss accelerates. The organization becomes progressively less capable.
Organizations see individual replacements and conclude replacement is acceptable. They don’t see the systemic effect of continuous replacement. The damage is diffuse and delayed.
By the time the damage is visible, causation is unclear. The organization can’t definitively connect current performance problems to good-employee turnover from two years ago. The intervention opportunity is long past.
Organizations would retain good employees if they recognized collective replacement cost. Individual replacement cost creates illusion that retention is optional.
The mathematical reality is that continuous replacement of good employees is organizationally destructive. Most organizations learn this too late to change trajectory.