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Arguably, the resignation that stings the most is when someone you hired just two years ago and spent money to train up leaves, just as you started to rely on them. It’s not bad luck, and it’s certainly not rare — the newest SA data shows people with just a few years’ invested training is the single most common resignation type.

Who is actually walking out

The latest Remchannel Salary and Wage Movements Survey, covering 42 organisations and 414,244 employees, found the highest resignation rates among staff with one to five years of service, the early-career professionals a company has already spent real money getting up to speed.

What it costs, and why almost nobody knows

Here is the part that should stop a boss. On Remchannel's conservative assumption that replacing someone costs 1.5 times their annual salary, replacing one entry-level matriculant on an average package works out to roughly R211,200. And yet fewer than one in four organisations regularly track what turnover actually costs them.

So the single largest avoidable expense in the building is the one almost no one has put a number to.

It's rarely about the money

The reflex is to assume they left for a bigger salary. Sometimes they did. But a lower salary, as Sebesho puts it, does not make turnover cheap if you are repeatedly paying to recruit, onboard, train and wait for productivity all over again.

Early-career people tend to leave when the job stops building them: no visible next step, no real feedback, no sense that anyone would notice if they went. All three are cheaper to fix than a resignation, and none of them is on the payslip.

You reward your strongest performer with a bigger role. It feels like the obvious call, and it is where a surprising number of good people come unstuck, because the job you just gave them is not a bigger version of the one they were great at. It is a completely different job.

Mike Vincent has spent about 20 years coaching CEOs across Africa into exactly these step-ups, and the number that got him into the work is a sobering one.

The pattern he describes is that the person who was brilliant in the detail is now supposed to set direction, put processes in place, and lead through other people, and nobody showed them how to make that shift. A great engineer might not make a great manager, because the two disciplines require completely different skill sets.

The title, he notes, does not confer the right to lead nor guarantee the loyalty of the team. That has to be earned in the new role, and it is a different skill from the one that earned the promotion.

The fix is not to promote less. It is to promote and then actually support the transition, rather than handing someone more responsibility and hoping.

The question worth sitting with: When you last moved someone up, did you set them up to lead differently, or just hand them more of the same job and hope it worked out?

38%

is the share of South African small businesses that reckon they could survive more than a year under current cost pressure without any outside support, according to Absa's Small Business Growth Index. This means close to two-thirds do not believe they could.

More than 70% expect to need additional finance within six months, and at least four in 10 are leaning on their own pockets to get there. It is a portrait of a sector running on thin margins and thinner buffers, and it is worth remembering when you look at your own suppliers, your customers and, frankly, your own runway.

Source: Absa Small Business Growth Index

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