Some people leave with two weeks’ notice. Some leave with none.
Some stop doing the thing you counted on for five years, because they were doing it from memory.
You can’t control that. You can control how much your business depends on it.
I’ve been at organizations where someone had been there twenty or thirty years, and nobody knew what she did.
Ask Alice. She knows how to do it. Nothing is written down.
Then Alice gets sick or retires, and nobody can do what she did.
Alice did her job well for thirty years. The business never asked her to write it down.
Owners want predictable people. You finally train someone, and they walk.
A manager who usually has everything under control gets buried in a week. A great employee gets an offer you can’t match.
You can hire better and train people. You can set clearer expectations. Those help.
None of them will make a person behave the way you planned for the next five years.
Ask yourself these about the business:
Does work stop when someone takes a week off?
Does a new hire running long stall the whole schedule?
Does a stuck manager have somewhere to send the problem?
Does a departure become a crisis, or just a hiring task?
If the answers are yes, people being people is manageable. If the answers are no, every surprise feels like bad luck.
It’s dependence, and you can fix dependence.
Build a business that can absorb people being human.