Why One Resignation Can Bring a Whole Company Down Like an Avalanche — On the "Atmosphere" of an Organization

Introduction

It’s a strange thing, but a company can suddenly start losing people in a chain reaction, all triggered by a single person quitting.

And the person who left isn’t necessarily some irreplaceable star.

If anything, it’s sometimes a “Wait, that guy?” kind of situation.

Yet from that one departure onward, somehow the atmosphere changes.

Before you know it, more people are signing up on job-hunting sites, interviews are being scheduled, and six months later the faces in the department have changed considerably.

I experienced exactly this myself when I was young.

The Dissatisfaction Was Not “Zero”

The development company I was at back then was small in headcount, and it wasn’t particularly a sweatshop either.

Relationships weren’t terrible. The work got done normally.

It was just that the pay was low.

Nobody said it out loud, but everyone surely thought, “Well, it is cheap.”

In other words, dissatisfaction did exist.

But it was within a “tolerable range.”

A company, it turns out, is held together by exactly this kind of “slight dissatisfaction” and “getting used to it.”

A Single “Firing” Changes the Atmosphere

One day, an employee who had been labeled useless left the company.

Since it’s a Japanese company, you basically can’t do the blunt American-movie-style “You’re fired.”

In reality, it seems he was effectively pushed out through things like a resignation recommendation or a pay cut.

Honestly, looking purely at his ability, I couldn’t say the company’s judgment was incomprehensible.

But the problem was what came after.

“Apparently the next target is so-and-so.”

The moment that kind of rumor started to spread, the atmosphere changed all at once.

The balance that had held up on “well, the pay’s low but it can’t be helped” collapsed.

People are funny — the moment the sense of “I can keep staying here and be fine” disappears, they suddenly become clear-headed.

And Then Everyone Starts Browsing Job Sites

I was one of them.

Before I knew it, I had registered on a job-hunting site.

And it turned out the world was full of companies with better conditions than I had imagined.

As a result, I moved to a fairly large company, and my annual income rose considerably.

And it wasn’t just me.

One person quit, then another, and before long the very air of the company had leaked out.

I think everyone had probably been at their limit from the start.

Then the “resignation recommendation” event came in, and people woke up to the reality: “Do I really need to take on risk for this kind of treatment?”

An Organization Doesn’t Run on “Logic” Alone

From management’s perspective, “profits are tight, so we cut people” is, I think, a rational decision.

In fact, there are situations where, looking only at the numbers, it’s correct.

But an organization is not a machine.

Relationships, a sense of security, atmosphere, momentum.

It barely holds together on such vague things.

So when you break the balance in the name of cost-cutting, it breaks more than you expected.

This is especially dangerous when:

• pay was low to begin with
• there’s no visible future
• dissatisfaction has been accumulating

A “make an example of someone” style resignation recommendation in this kind of state is risky.

On the surface it’s quiet, but beneath the water everyone has their job sites open.

And Yet the Company Surprisingly Doesn’t Die

What’s interesting is that even after all those people leave, the company itself surprisingly survives.

Of course, productivity and profits dropped considerably, I’m sure.

The front lines must have been a mess.

And yet the company itself doesn’t vanish.

Put another way, a company may be a creature that prolongs its life by swapping out its “people.”

But the “atmosphere” and “culture” that once existed there were probably already something else entirely.

Closing

I’m still grateful to that company itself.

It was without a doubt that environment that built up my basic stamina as an IT engineer.

Precisely because it was a small company, I was made to do everything. Servers, code, troubleshooting — it was all drilled into me on the job.

But money does matter, after all.

No matter how good the relationships, no matter how rewarding the work, when the conditions exceed the limit, people face reality.

Strangely enough, nearly 25 years have passed since then, and I still get together for drinks with those old members about once a year.

More than the company itself, perhaps it’s the human relationships that last longer in the end.