An 18% overtime spike.
That’s the number that most reliably tells you who’s leaving next.
Not the person who just handed in their notice. The people sitting closest to the empty desk.
When someone leaves, their workload doesn’t disappear. It redistributes. Across colleagues who are already fully stretched. Schedule volatility goes up. Absence starts to tick. QA scores dip — not enough to flag, but enough to show in the data.
Nobody raises a concern. Nobody’s having a hard conversation. The team is absorbing the pressure. Quietly. Efficiently. Until they’re not.
In contact centre environments, that 18% overtime threshold is one of the strongest leading indicators of impending attrition in the surrounding team. The departure wasn’t a surprise. The conditions for it were visible 30 to 60 days before the resignation landed on anyone’s desk.
One exit is a management event. Three exits from the same team inside 90 days is an operational failure that was almost always preventable.
The question isn’t how to respond to attrition. It’s how to see it before it arrives.