Most managers experience churn as a sudden event. One day an employee walks in with a resignation letter, HR starts the backfill process, and leadership asks what went wrong. By that point, the decision has usually been made weeks or months earlier. The visible exit is only the final chapter. The real story of churn begins much earlier, in the small shifts of energy and behaviour that many managers notice but do not quite know how to interpret. Those subtle changes are what we can call pre churn behaviour at work, and learning to read them is one of the most useful skills a manager can develop.
Pre churn behaviour is not just about a single unhappy person who decided to leave. It is a pattern that emerges when expectations, workload, recognition, and growth fall out of sync. It shows up first in how someone participates in the team system, not in a dramatic outburst or a confrontational email. The trouble is that most organisations still treat churn as an HR statistic rather than as a design problem in how work is structured and how people experience their roles. Exit interviews gather polite surface reasons. Managers move on without examining the underlying structure that produced the disengagement in the first place. As a result, the same pre-churn patterns repeat with different faces.
In younger companies or founder-led teams, there is often an additional blind spot. Leaders believe that mission, culture, or loyalty will override the friction of unclear roles, shifting priorities, or uneven workloads. When a loyal early team member starts to disengage, the reaction is often confusion or disappointment instead of curiosity. The assumption is that the person has changed, when in reality the system around them has been changing all along. When managers view pre churn behaviour as a character issue or an attitude problem, they make it harder to intervene. Quiet judgment replaces shared responsibility, and both parties lose the chance to repair the situation before it hardens into a resignation.
The way pre churn behaviour appears in day to day work is rarely dramatic. It looks like a previously proactive team member who now waits for instructions. It looks like someone who once volunteered for stretch projects and now politely declines. Their work still meets the basic standard, but the spark has faded. They do what is asked, not because they are particularly invested, but because it is the minimum required. This slow shift from ownership to compliance is one of the clearest early signals that a person is re-negotiating their relationship with the job internally, even if they are not ready to say it out loud.
You can often see changes in how they communicate. A voice that used to challenge assumptions or raise risks early becomes quieter in meetings. The person agrees quickly to proposals but rarely follows up with questions. They stop offering dissenting views and share only neutral, safe comments. They might move more of their communication into written updates and fewer spontaneous conversations. When conflict shows up, they step to the side rather than help resolve it. The rest of the team feels the absence, but because nothing explodes, it is easy to treat the change as a temporary mood rather than a meaningful pattern.
There are softer, administrative clues as well. Leave days are taken in scattered pieces that feel less like rest and more like short escapes. Cameras stay off more often, or the person keeps their participation in virtual meetings to a bare minimum. One to one sessions that once felt lively turn into quick, transactional check-ins where both sides go through the motions. It can feel as if the person is emotionally packing up long before they formally leave. On their own, any of these changes might simply reflect a busy season or personal stress. Together, they often tell the story of pre churn.
Managers do not ignore these signals because they are indifferent. They usually miss them because their attention is consumed by deadlines and delivery, and because they lack a clear mental model for what pre churn looks like. In the absence of that shared language, behaviour is interpreted through personal bias. Some managers are quick to label someone as unmotivated. Others overcompensate and avoid any difficult conversation altogether. Both responses leave the underlying misalignment unresolved.
Performance metrics contribute to the blindness. Many managers are trained to look at outputs more than lived experience. As long as tasks are completed and clients are satisfied, it can feel intrusive to explore how someone is truly feeling about their work. If a person who used to go above and beyond decides to do only what is required, the dashboard may still show all green. Yet that quiet drop in discretionary effort is often the first stage of an exit that will only become visible months later.
There is also a fear factor. Naming what you see means inviting a conversation that might be uncomfortable. A manager may worry that the employee will say they are unhappy with the manager’s style, with strategic decisions that are outside the manager’s control, or with structural issues that cannot be solved quickly. It can feel safer to hope that the mood will pass than to risk uncovering a truth you do not know how to address. That avoidance is understandable, but it is also the mechanism through which pre churn behaviour becomes permanent.
A more useful approach is to treat pre churn detection as a recurring scan across four domains of behaviour: work, communication, learning, and belonging. This does not require a complex system. It requires managers to pause regularly and ask what has changed in each of these areas for the people they rely on most. In the work domain, the question is simple. Has the nature of this person’s output changed. Are they still taking ownership of problems and proposing solutions, or have they shifted into executing only what is written in the task description. Are deadlines still met with the same care and thought, or are you seeing more last minute submissions and fewer proactive updates. One off changes may mean little. A steady pattern is a different story.
In communication, it is worth asking whether their voice in the team has become significantly quieter over time. Do they still raise risks early, or do issues from their area now surface only when they have already become urgent. Have they gone from clear opinions to vague, non-committal statements. Managers can gently test this by using one to one time for open questions such as, “Is there anything about how we work that you notice but have stopped raising.” The goal is not to interrogate, but to re-open channels that may have been quietly closed. The learning domain is about curiosity. Pre churn often comes with a drop in learning energy. People stop asking for feedback, stop seeking cross functional exposure, and stop suggesting new ideas or experiments. It is not that they have lost interest in growth as a concept. It is that they no longer see this environment as the place where the next phase of their growth will happen. They are conserving energy for whatever comes next, even if they have not yet named that next step.
Belonging is the fourth domain. Here, the signals are more social but no less important. Does the person still show up for informal rituals, shared meals, or small moments of connection. Are they still someone others go to for advice, or have they quietly stepped away from mentoring and supporting newer colleagues. Often, a person exits socially and emotionally from the team long before they exit on paper. When managers only focus on task performance, they miss these early withdrawals from community. None of these domains should be treated as a reason to panic. The purpose of watching them is to recognise a narrative before it hardens. Once a manager notices that pre churn behaviour may be emerging, the next step is not a performance warning. It is a different kind of conversation altogether. Instead of a backward looking performance review, what is needed is a stay conversation that focuses on present reality and possible futures.
A thoughtful stay conversation begins with observed reality. A manager might say, “Over the past six weeks I have noticed some changes in how you show up. There seems to be less initiative on project X, more silence in meetings, and fewer ideas coming from you. I want to check what that matches or misses from how you are experiencing work right now.” That framing matters. It anchors the discussion in specific behaviour without assigning blame. It signals openness to being corrected, and it invites the employee to fill in the emotional context behind the observations.
From there, the conversation can move into constraints. What currently feels heavy, misaligned, or confusing about their role. Is the scope too broad for one person. Are decision rights unclear. Is there a gap between what was promised and what is actually rewarded. Sometimes the friction comes from life circumstances outside of work. Sometimes it comes from organisational design choices that were never revisited as the team grew. The aim is not to fix everything on the spot but to map the terrain honestly.
The final part of the stay conversation looks forward. What would need to change for this role to feel alive again. Is it a clearer charter, different types of projects, more support, or a shift in reporting lines. A manager does not need to guarantee every request. What matters is treating the employee as a partner in shaping their experience, within the real limits of the business. Often the conversation itself restores some trust, because it shows that the organisation is willing to adjust the system instead of only asking the individual to be more resilient.
Not every pre churn story will end with retention, and that is not a sign of failure. Sometimes the most honest conclusion is that the best next step is a respectful, planned exit. Even then, there is value to be extracted at the system level. When several people from the same function display similar pre churn behaviour, the signal almost never points to individual weakness alone. It may point to an overloaded manager, a product roadmap that changes constantly without communication, or incentives that reward last minute heroics more than disciplined planning. Leaders who review these patterns can treat them as internal usability tests for the organisation itself.
There is also a preventative dimension. When teams invest in regular one to ones, transparent role charters, and clear decision boundaries, they reduce the room for silent resentment. When people know which channels exist for raising concerns and see those channels being used without punishment, they are more likely to attach words to their discomfort instead of withdrawing in silence. Culture, in this sense, is not a vague aspiration. It is the set of designed pathways through which concerns move and are acted on.
For individual managers, two reflective questions can anchor this practice. First, if you stopped showing up for two weeks, whose energy or work quality would you quietly worry about. That instinct often reveals where pre churn behaviour is already in motion, even if no one has said it outright. Second, for each critical role on your team, can you describe what healthy engagement looks like in concrete terms. Without that definition, it becomes very difficult to notice when engagement begins to erode.
Pre churn behaviour at work is not a mysterious phenomenon reserved for specialists to decode. It is simply the visible surface of deeper issues in design, alignment, and trust. Managers who train themselves to see these early signals, who invite honest dialogue around them, and who are willing to adjust the system instead of only correcting the person, will still experience turnover. The difference is that their churn will be more intentional, less chaotic, and far more informative. Their teams will not expect them to predict every resignation. What they will remember is whether concerns were noticed early, heard clearly, and addressed with clarity rather than surprise.
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