How To React When You Unexpectedly Lose A Team Member + How To Be Prepared For Employee Turnover
Heads up: I use affiliate links for my fave products. If you click and purchase, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you.
You might not think it could happen to you, but once you find yourself suddenly without a team member, you’ll be glad this blog exists! No one wants to think about unexpected shifts in their team or employee turnover. It’s WAY more fun to think that our employees will stick with us forever, right?
The reality is, your team members are people with lives outside of work, and sometimes things happen that mean they won’t be able to work for you anymore. Maybe they need to step back for personal reasons, they decide to change career paths, or they get another job somewhere else.
No matter WHY your team member leaves your firm, it’s best to support them and have a plan! Don’t get caught in a bind where you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes and you have to scramble to pick up the slack. Even if you’re no longer in the day-to-day of your firm, there’s a way to make it easy peasy for anyone to jump in and take over to fill the void.
And it’s not just about when someone quits — this is helpful for vacations, leave of absence, or an unplanned sick day. By creating a process for this exact instance, you can replace the lost team member with less stress and disruption to your firm’s operations!
Read on to learn:
How to be prepared before you lose a team member
How to take action and find a replacement
Exactly how we’d handle losing an employee all of a sudden
What To Do When A Team Member Quits
If this specific team member is especially valuable and a great culture fit, it might not hurt to ask if there’s anything you can do to change their mind. Sometimes, it’s an easy fix as long as you’re not crossing any lines into special treatment territory. But if there’s anything you can offer them within reason, you might be able to keep them around!
Create A Plan That’s Proactive, Not Reactive
The best time to create a plan and process for replacing team members, is when you hire them. I find it best to have a plan for each role within your company. So if you have account managers, bookkeepers, and an administrative assistant, you’ll want to include a plan for each of those in case someone ever leaves.
List out how the team members’ work load will be distributed and how you plan on finding someone new.
Replacing someone in a management role is trickier, since they often have a very specific set of skills and deal with sensitive information. That’s where you might have to step in and fill in the gaps until you’re able to fill that position again. OR it might be a good opportunity to promote someone from within to a leadership role (if they’re ready of course!).
Here’s How We’d Handle Unexpected Employee Turnover In Our Firm
At Magnetic Bookkeeping, we know our team isn’t bound to us for life! Luckily, when a team member needs to resign, we aren’t scrambling to pick up the pieces thanks to our rock-solid process!
So, if a team member came to us today and gave their notice, this is exactly what we’d do:
Initiate the recruiting process. We use Indeed and a few other creative hiring strategies when we’re ready to fill a position in our firm, so the first thing we’d do is finalize a job description to match the role and get it out into the world.
Refer to our emergency plan. Like I mentioned above, we recommend having a plan written out for each type of role in your company. For us, this information is stored in Notion, but you could also use a simple Google Doc with detailed information and actionable steps. Use this information to redistribute the workload as needed until you find a replacement.
Document any missing processes. Team members should be documenting their processes and storing them in some kind of centralized hub (again, Notion is our obsession for this). But just in case you notice any missing SOPs, it’s totally worth it to create them before you onboard the next team member!
Consider bonusing existing employees. When you have to redistribute tasks and client work to your remaining employees, you might want to thing about increasing their pay (even if it’s just temporary). That way, when you find someone new, none of your work is behind AND your team is happy! Even if you don’t do a bonus, it’s a nice idea to do something special to compensate them for supporting you during the transition period.
The Absolute Best Way To Be Prepared For Anything As A Firm Owner
We know exactly how to handle this situation because we’ve been there! When you own a business with a team (or plans for a future team), you NEED to be prepared for all the things — ideally before they happen.
But if you’re a firm owner who WANTS to be prepared for real growth, set yourself up to scale to new heights, and eventually remove yourself from the daily operations of your firm…
Breakthrough for Bookkeepers & Accountants has incredible assets, resources, video training, live coaching, student community, and basically anything else you’d need to confidently level-up your business as a whole!
Our team of expert coaches will guide you through the challenges that come with building your dream firm. You’ll get support through our proven methods, right alongside other bookkeepers and accountants (aka your new biz besties!) and our team of experts.
It’s our most robust, high-touch group coaching program — and we’d love to see you inside!
