Workload that never lets up

Sustained pressure loses people slowly and predictably.

Intense periods are tolerable and are part of most work. What loses people is the absence of any trough: a permanent state of being behind, where every completed thing is replaced immediately and there is no point at which anybody is caught up.

This is usually a resourcing decision that has not been named as one. Vacancies not filled, a project absorbed without capacity, or a growth target set without the staffing to meet it each produce it, and the cost appears as turnover months later rather than as a budget line.

The signals precede the resignations: declining discretionary effort, people declining optional work, meetings being skipped, and a rise in short absences. Each is legible to a manager who is looking.

The intervention that works is removing something rather than adding support. Resilience offered to somebody with an unmanageable workload communicates that the workload will not change, which is the actual message received.

It is worth adding that the counter-offer also affects the person's manager, who now knows their team member was leaving and was retained by the organisation over their head. That relationship rarely recovers fully, and it is a cost of the decision that nobody accounts for.