The True Cost of Poor Employee Exits
Most organisations invest heavily in recruitment, development, and retention — but when it comes to offboarding, the process becomes rushed, transactional, or emotionally disconnected.
The truth?
How you exit employees shapes your culture just as much as how you hire them.
Here’s what poor exits really cost:
1. Reputational Damage
Employees talk. A negative exit becomes a Glassdoor review, a LinkedIn post, or an industry rumour. Your employer brand feels the impact long after the person leaves.
2. Team Morale Drop
When remaining employees witness a poorly handled exit, trust erodes. Productivity dips. Psychological safety disappears. When an employee hands in their resignation, you lost them months ago.
3. Operational Disruption
Compromised or no handover. Lost knowledge. Project/client delays. Leaders scrambling to fill gaps. A good exit protects business continuity — a bad one costs time and money and leaves a team with little to no plan.
4. Legal & Compliance Risks
Rushed exits increase the risk of disputes, claims, and costly settlements — all preventable with a respectful, transparent, structured process.
5. Lost Alumni Advocacy
Former employees can be your biggest ambassadors — or your biggest critics. How you exit them determines which one they will become.
The Real Impact in Dubai
Losing a job in Dubai isn’t just career disruption. It can feel like suffering multiple injuries at once:
Visa implications and residency concerns
Loss of medical insurance
School fee uncertainty for dependents
Financial and logistical pressure with tight timeframes
The emotional toll is magnified with these concerns. This makes a compassionate, structured exit not just good practice — but a moral and cultural responsibility.
The Solution: Treat Offboarding as a Strategic Business Decision
Compassionate, structured offboarding and outplacement support isn't just “nice to have.”
It protects your brand, culture, and bottom line.
When you exit people well, you create trust — even in the hard moments.
If your organisation wants to elevate its offboarding experience, protect its culture, and provide meaningful support to transitioning employees, I can help.
Get in touch to enquire about my Outplacement & Career Transition Support Services.
Let’s ensure your exits reflect the values you want your company to be remembered for.
The High-Performance Trap. When Excellence turns into Exhaustion
Have you ever noticed how easily “high performance” becomes a way of life — until it quietly starts running you?
I see this often in the leaders and executives I coach: the ones who are brilliant, ambitious, and deeply committed. The same traits that drive their success also make them vulnerable to burnout.
Here’s why high performance can be a trap — and how to redefine it before it costs you your energy, focus, and health.
In high-achieving circles, “performance” is often worn like a badge of honour. We celebrate those who go the extra mile, stay late, deliver early, and somehow still make it look effortless.
But there’s a hidden cost to that constant push for more.
It’s what I call the high-performance trap — where the pursuit of excellence quietly turns into a cycle of overextension, exhaustion and burnout.
It starts innocently enough. You’re passionate, capable, and driven. People rely on you because you always deliver. That reliability earns you trust, visibility, and opportunity.
But slowly, performance becomes your identity.
You stop asking “How am I?” and start asking “What more can I do?”
You begin to equate your worth with your output. The work that once energised you now drains you — and yet, slowing down feels like failure.
When High Performance Becomes Unsustainable
The very traits that make someone exceptional — ambition, resilience, and accountability — can also become the very things that lead to burnout.
You keep saying yes because you don’t want to disappoint.
Struggle to rest because you feel guilty not being productive.
Ignore the subtle signs — the fatigue, the irritability, the sleepless nights — until they become impossible to ignore.
And the truth is, no one burns out overnight.
It happens gradually, disguised as “just a busy season,” “just this one big project,” “just a few more hours.”
Some invisible costs of constant achievement
The cost isn’t just exhaustion — it’s disconnection:
From your energy, your focus, your creativity.
From your sense of purpose and fulfilment.
Sometimes, even from the people who matter most.
What started as a drive to excel ends up eroding the very performance you’re trying to sustain.
Redefining What It Means to Perform
True high performance isn’t about doing more — it’s about self-awareness and knowing when to slow down and step back in order to give your best.
It’s about presence, not pressure.
Sustainability, not sacrifice.
The highest performers I’ve coached don’t just manage time; they manage energy, mindset, and recovery.
They recognise that rest is not a reward — it’s a requirement.
That clarity and creativity come from stillness, not constant motion.
Because you can’t run at 100% when your internal battery is at 20%.
Instead of asking “How much can I achieve?” try “How can I achieve thist with ease, clarity, and balance?”
When you create space for recovery, reflection, and alignment, you don’t lose your edge — you sharpen it.
It’s time we stop glorifying burnout as proof of commitment and start shifting from performing to thriving. Because success isn’t sustainable unless you are.
Is stress contagious?
Is stress contagious?
We’ve all seen it. The short, sharp email that lands just before a deadline. The tense meeting where shoulders are tight, jaws clenched, and hearts race. Stressful situations don’t just affect individuals—they ripple across teams like wildfire.
What often gets overlooked is the impact this has on business. When stress goes unaddressed, it seeps into culture and, over time, becomes “the norm.” The cost is high: toxic workplace environments, higher turnover, absenteeism, and lower productivity. And ultimately, all of this hits one thing hardest—the bottom line.
Workplace stress isn’t a buzzword or something to brush aside. It directly erodes revenue and, more importantly, decision-making. Under pressure, our ability to think clearly shrinks because the brain’s fight-or-flight center takes over, hijacking the parts responsible for rational thinking and problem-solving.
By contrast, cultivating calm isn’t just “feel-good fluff.” It’s essential. A calmer state activates the brain areas needed for creativity, strategic thinking, problem-solving, and effective communication—the skills that drive performance at every level.
Stress Really Is Contagious
Research shows that stress isn’t just personal; it’s social. Human sweat carries chemical signals that communicate emotions like fear, anxiety, and stress. On top of that, our nervous systems constantly pick up cues through body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions. This means stress can spread across teams without a word being spoken.
The good news? Managing stress is a skill. Studies show that techniques like emotional intelligence training, coaching, and somatic practices can re-train our nervous systems to respond differently. Teaching teams to regulate stress in the moment is far less disruptive than managing a crisis after the fact.
And it doesn’t just stop at the workplace. Building awareness of stress and its physiological effects supports long-term health and resilience—turning short-term fixes into lasting change.
So what can be done?
Recognise the problem – and call it out.
Learn to shift from fight-or-flight into rest-and-digest to calm the nervous system.
Create safe spaces for employees to raise concerns about stress triggers.
Educate and practice proactive stress reduction, through coaching, somatic therapy, or other evidence-based approaches.
Our fast-paced world isn’t slowing down. The question is: how will we choose to respond?