On a Tuesday, a desk is empty. Monitor dark. Someone took the nameplate off, leaving a pale rectangle on the divider. The plant is still there.
By Wednesday, your Slack has a new private channel.
Nobody from leadership says a word. Perhaps an email lands. "Sam has decided to pursue other opportunities. We wish them well." Thirteen words, written by a lawyer, signed by nobody in particular.
Your team is not stupid. They work out the shape of the thing from the silence around it.
What you bought, and what you paid for
Settlement agreements exist for reasons. Sometimes an awful situation needs an ending both sides accept, and a payment with a confidentiality clause gets there without two years of tribunal.
I understand the mechanics. I have signed things. Most people at my career stage have.
Here is my problem. The clause gets sold to boards as risk management. In practice it buys one narrow thing: legal quiet from one person. It costs you something wide: the willingness of everyone still employed to believe anything you say about anyone leaving, ever again.
Bad trade.
The scale of the habit
Hushed exits are far more common than most leaders think.
Can't Buy My Silence, the campaign run by Zelda Perkins and Julie Macfarlane, cites lawyers estimating 95% of civil settlements now include an NDA. Their round-up of several studies puts one in three workers as having signed some form of NDA. Women report signing at 42%, men at 39%. In sales the figure hits 50%.
Tech is not exempt. A Blind survey of 10,242 technology workers found 15.3% saying an NDA stopped them speaking up about important workplace issues. Tesla topped the table at 30%. Intel came in at 20.74%, Amazon at 20.25%, Google at 11.76%, LinkedIn lowest at 7.25%.
Read the survey wording again. Not "signed an NDA". Silenced by one. Different thing entirely.
The law is closing the door
If your risk strategy leans on silence, the ground is shifting under it.
In the US, the Speak Out Act, signed in December 2022, made pre-dispute nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses unenforceable in sexual assault and sexual harassment disputes. Worth knowing the limit. It bites on clauses agreed before a dispute arises, not on a settlement signed afterwards.
In the UK, the Employment Rights Bill reaches further. It voids any contractual term stopping a worker from disclosing harassment or discrimination as defined by the Equality Act 2010, in employment contracts and settlement agreements alike. Protection extends to witnesses, and to disclosures about how the employer handled the allegations. Ordinary confidentiality over trade secrets survives untouched.
I'm not sure about this part: the Bill's NDA provisions were still moving through consultation on "excepted agreements" as I wrote this in August 2026, so check the current commencement position with an employment lawyer before leaning on any of it.
Your engineers already run a better process
Here is the bit making me grind my teeth.
Your engineering org runs blameless postmortems. Production falls over, you pull everyone together, you write down the timeline, you publish the contributing factors, and you fix the system rather than the person. Nobody argues about this any more. It works.
Then a manager drives three good people out of the same team over eighteen months, and the whole apparatus goes dark. No timeline. No contributing factors. Nothing published. A payment, a clause, and an email with thirteen words in it.
Two standards. Rigorous transparency for machines, total blackout for humans. And you wonder why your people believe the incident reports and disbelieve the leadership updates.
My own research found 99.5% of survey respondents had suffered one or more types of bad boss. Not most. Effectively everyone. Lay the silence habit on top of a near-universal experience of bad management and ask yourself what a hushed exit sounds like to your team.
It sounds like confirmation.
The story you refuse to tell gets written anyway
An information vacuum never stays empty. Your people fill it with the worst plausible version, and the worst plausible version is free to spread.
The real bill, in the order it arrives:
- Retention. Your strongest performers, the ones with options, quietly refresh their CVs. They read a hushed exit as evidence of how you handle a problem.
- Recruitment. Unexplained departures reach Glassdoor, Blind and group chats within days. Candidates read those long before your careers page.
- Institutional knowledge. Nobody debriefs the person walking out. Whatever they knew about the flaky deploy pipeline walks out with them.
- Repeat offence. Learn nothing, fix nothing, and the same manager does the same thing to the next three people.
The last one is the killer.
I watched this play out once. A team lost a well-liked engineer with no explanation. Within a month two more had gone, neither of them for money. The exit interviews, such as they were, went to the same manager who caused the problem. Leadership read the attrition report and concluded the market was hot. The market was fine. The manager was the market.
Silence is not neutrality. Silence is a decision to protect the position rather than the people standing next to it.
What to say when you are unable to say much
Leaders hide behind legal advice as a reason for saying nothing at all. Legal advice restricts the specifics of a settlement. It does not require you to become a ghost.
Try these instead of thirteen words.
Name the departure like an adult
"Sam has left the business. I am unable to go into the circumstances, and I am not going to pretend there were none."
Your team already knows. Acknowledging reality costs you nothing and buys back a great deal.
Publish the fix, not the case
You are unable to discuss Sam's exit. You are entirely able to say: "We reviewed how escalations get handled in this group. Here is what changes from Monday." Fix in public, detail in private.
Act on the pattern
If three people leave one role, the role is the story, not the people. I wrote about this here: If Three People Quit the Same Role, Stop Blaming the People.
Give exit conversations to someone independent
Not the line manager. Not the manager's mate in HR. Somebody with the standing to escalate and no stake in the outcome.
Count your settlements every quarter
One a year is life. Six a year is a system. Put the number in front of your board next to your attrition figures and watch how fast the conversation changes.
If you want help building the management habits sitting underneath all of this, the leadership workshops at Step It Up HR exist for exactly this gap.
The red flag test
Kelly Swingler puts it bluntly. A company hushing exits and refusing to discuss what happened is telling you something about itself. Believe it.
Apply the test to your own place. Think of the last three people who left under a cloud.
Do you know why? Does your team? Did anything change afterwards?
Three honest noes and your confidentiality clause is not managing risk. It is storing it, with interest.
So here is the question worth sitting with before you sign the next one. Who exactly is being protected... and would you be comfortable if your whole team saw the answer?