Lateral quitter: Difference between revisions

{{image|replacement cost of lateral quitter|png|The true replacement cost of a lateral quitter}}}}{{d|{{PAGENAME}}|ˈlætərəl ˈkwɪtə|n|}}One who voluntarily leaves your organisation to work somewhere else.  

Management will steadfastly deny any lateral quitter is missed. The trend towards “exit interview by [[chatbot]]”, if you get one at all, that is, suggests corporations are systematically underestimating the size of the problem. [[HR]] acts as if gripped by the conviction that having employees at all is a matter for regret. So, scant effort is made to discourage, impede or even identify those on the payroll who are thinking about leaving, let alone asking those who do for their motivations.

The JC wonders whether this is not an oversight. Proceeding on the premise that all staff bring ''some'' value, and at least half bring more than they cost, lateral quitting is a broadly negative sum game.

For lateral quitters tend to be ''good'' employees that you ''didn’t'' want to leave. That is, exactly those who contribute more than they cost. This stands to reason: those who don’t; who you wanted to leave anyway, should already have left, because you ''made'' them. Right?

In any case employment should not, however much [[human resources]] dogma implies otherwise, be a hostage situation. Either way.

Now, it is true: there ''is'' a sort of “[[bid/ask spread]]” between staff you genuinely value and those you would be just as happy never to see again. This we call the “[[competence phase transition]]”. It is 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. It is a remarkably stable state: [[Weak gazelle|staff of such a tepid bearing]] can comfortably inhabit this zone for decades. Some do, every now and then, have a rush of blood to the head and throw in the towel, often  at times of mass exuberance: you know, dotcom booms, [[Cryptobabble|crypto mania]], that kind of thing, when in a fit of irrational (and uncharacteristic) exuberance, these people join [[FTX|fly-by-night stablecoin start-ups]] and [[Lexrifyly|legaltech ventures]]. They are not generally heard of again until they show up in the fossil record as evidence of one of these mass extinctions that the financial service industry undergoes every decade or so.