Lateral quitter
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Office anthropology™
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Lateral quitter
ˈlætərəl ˈkwɪtə (n.)
One who voluntarily leaves your organisation to work somewhere else. Managers will steadfastly deny any lateral quitters are ever missed, but there are excel spreadsheets that will prove otherwise.
As a matter of logic lateral quitters will tend to be good employees you didn’t want to leave. If they are not, you should be “encouraging them” to leave anyway.
Now, it is true: there is a bid/ask spread at the “phase transition” between employees you genuinely value and those you would be just as happy never to see again — a sort of purgatorial state occupied by earnest plodders who don’t really earn their keep but do no real harm, such that you can’t quite summon the bureaucratic energy to proactively whack them, but few will shed crocodile tears if they did decide to push off. These types do every now and then have a rush of blood to the head and throw in the towel, especially at times of mass exuberance: you know, dotcom booms, crypto mania, that kind of thing, displaying a lemming-like willingness to show up in the fossil record then these periodic mass extinctions occur. God speed all our friends in operations at Coinbase right now: enjoy it while it lasts.
Anyway. Leaving aside the purgatorial plodders lateral leavers will generally be your good employees are leaving. If your HR were worth the compendious space it occupied, it would its some time analysing what these lateral quitters are, and asking why, in general terms, they are walking away.
It takes no towering intellectual insight to boil it down to one of three things: money, progression, and quality of work.
Another way of looking at that continuum is this: you pay poor employees more than they are worth to you, and good employees ,less than than they are worth.
That they