Jenna runs a 35-person coffee roastery in the foothills of North Carolina. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows each other’s schedule, where a sick day strains the whole team. Like most small business owners, she wears every hat: manager, scheduler, problem solver, sometimes dishwasher. And like too many others, she’s been blindsided by resignations that seem to come out of nowhere.
When her third barista in two months quit, she didn’t feel angry. She felt tired. She had given raises. She had asked people how they were doing. She even started a suggestion box. But none of it gave her what she really needed: a way to see it coming.
This is reality for most small business owners in America. No HR department. No consultants or engagement dashboards. No capacity to run anonymous surveys and regression models to predict attrition. What they do have is their team and the quiet fear that someone else might already be halfway out the door.
That’s when Jenna found a piece of advice that seemed too simple to be valuable: “If you want to know who’s thinking about leaving, just ask.”
It came from Dr. David Nulty, a people analytics expert whose research showed that when employees say they’re likely to leave, they usually do. But Jenna knew that walking up to someone and asking “Are you planning to quit?” wouldn’t work. In a company that small, honesty can feel dangerous.
So she tried something different. During a quiet moment at the end of a shift, she sat down with one of her shift leads and asked: “Is there anything you’re seeing from your seat that I might be missing from mine?“
It wasn’t a trick or a test. It was shared ownership. And it worked.
That question didn’t just give her information. It built trust. It made the conversation safe. It didn’t ask employees to declare loyalty or expose frustrations. It invited them to help, to notice, to matter.
Over the next few weeks, she asked the same question in different ways, and the insights flowed. One employee said the new closing routine was causing tension. Another mentioned that a teammate had gone quiet. One said: “I’ve been tired lately, not sure why, but I don’t feel like myself here anymore.”
None were on the verge of quitting yet. But they were drifting. Because Jenna asked gently, early, without pressure, she could pull them back before it was too late. This never shows up in data dashboards. It’s missing from policy briefs and white papers. Retention isn’t just a metric. It’s a relationship. In small businesses, where trust is the only currency, the right question can be worth more than any software subscription.
We treat employee engagement like something that needs measuring at scale, analyzing in charts, dissecting in meetings. But for the vast majority of businesses, the local shops, family restaurants, independent contractors with part-time help, none of that exists. What they need is something honest, human, something they can use today.
“Is there anything you’re seeing from your seat that I might be missing from mine?”
That’s the question. It invites care without control. It offers dignity without performance. And it gives you the one thing you need most: a chance to act before someone’s already gone.
This didn’t come from a corporate playbook. It came from a conversation and the kind of insight we too often overlook. Dr. David Nulty’s research in people analytics surfaced this simple but powerful truth: employee intention is the strongest predictor of departure. His research shows what the data says. This fictional story shows what it looks like in real life.
And it starts with one question.