Resignations follow the school year

The school year here ends in a few weeks, and this is the month a Gulf team finds out who is leaving.

A family with children in school does not move country mid-term. The fees are paid for the year, the term ends in June, the flat is emptied in July, and the school in the other country wants the child in August. So the decision is made in the winter, when next year's place has to be confirmed, and the resignation arrives in the spring.

Attrition here therefore arrives in a cluster rather than across twelve months, and the notice periods run out through the emptiest weeks of the year, when half the building is away and nobody is watching a handover.

Nothing measures the shape of that. The company measures annual attrition, a percentage on a slide, accurate and useless. A figure spread evenly across a year is a fact about a market. Landing inside one quarter, out of teams nobody asked whether they could be short in September, it is a different problem, and no slide separates the two.

Meanwhile the autumn plan is being written, and the autumn does not run twice. It is staffed from the org chart on the wall, and that chart is the one document in the building which does not yet contain its own departures. Some of the people in those boxes have decided already, and have said nothing, because saying it early costs them and helps nobody.

The answer is not to go asking who is leaving. Nobody owes me that.

It is to stop staffing a plan from names. The question worth asking in May is which parts of the autumn depend on one person knowing something nobody else knows, and whether those parts survive a notice served in June.

Attrition in this region runs on the school calendar, not the financial one.