What to do when half your team quits and isn't replaced
When massive turnover cuts a department down to a skeleton crew without backfills, remaining employees are left to absorb a crushing workload that pushes them from 40-hour weeks to nearly 60. This chronic understaffing leads directly to burnout, forcing people to either scale back their output or abandon ship entirely.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Leaving the company for a new job with better pay or title bumps
- 2Scaling back effort to only work standard hours (e.g., 40 hours) and letting things fail
- 3Relying on outsourced firms, temps, or contractors to temporarily cover the work
- 4Taking a break to destress, go back to school, or figure out next steps
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“More than half the department is gone. No new hires. Shit is falling apart.”source ↗
“I burned myself out pretty good trying to hold it all together for a while - then I gave up and now just do what fits into 40 hours and then I go home.”source ↗
“My transfer pricing team is now me and a reporting director. The team is smaller now than it was 3 acquisitions ago. Debating on just quitting and to destress and just go back to school or figure out my next move.”source ↗
“Throughout the first half of 2022, another 8 people quit, including my boss, who was replaced by a total bitch of a controller. The worst part about all of this is that they barely hired replacements, so over the course of a year my standard work week went from 40 hours to nearly 60.”source ↗
“My AM and his supervisor are no longer there. Was there another consolidation or is it just that I was the unlucky MSP who lost both?”source ↗
“Back early this year (maybe January range?) our AM and his boss were supposedly “reassigned” which I’ve heard was that they may have been fired due to Kaseya firing a bunch of their sales team and hiring from South America.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2Why do people get fired from accounting jobs so fast?
- 11Why are managers asking IT to fix employee disciplinary problems?
- 11How to deal with toxic leadership during company layoffs
- 2How to manage an older employee with more experience who undermines you
- 4How to handle a new teacher who is trying to take over
- 8Why do coworkers always bypass their supervisors to come straight to me?