My100Dreams.Com

There’s a quiet shift happening in many organisations — one that doesn’t show up on spreadsheets until it’s too late. It’s not about sales numbers, project milestones, or even market share. It’s about empathy — or rather, its slow disappearance.

It’s visible in the way conversations become shorter, emails colder, and “How are you?” sounds more like a checkbox than genuine concern. People still turn up to work, but fewer turn up in spirit. The warmth that once bound teams together is now a polite handshake at best, a transactional nod at worst.

And with empathy fading, attrition rises. Not just the kind seen in resignation letters, but the invisible kind — the emotional attrition. Employees disengage months before leaving physically. They stop raising ideas, stop asking “Why?”, and most dangerously, stop caring.

In a world obsessed with performance metrics, it’s easy to forget that humans are not resources to be optimised but stories to be understood. Empathy isn’t “soft” — it’s structural. It’s the glue that keeps talent from walking away, and the spark that keeps teams pushing through the toughest days.

An organisation doesn’t crumble when it loses a client; it crumbles when it loses its ability to care for its own people. If the goal is to retain talent, then retaining humanity must come first.

Because when the heart leaves, the resignation letter is only a matter of time.