Please, please, please!

How many times have I repeated myself?

Three times, right?

The reason is, as a CEO, despite being in top management, you need to closely monitor your high performers before they transition into becoming average employees.

When pressure increases, they quietly quit without even serving notice.

Yes, I’ve seen such occurrences, and since your main goal is to have the right talent who can help your business generate more revenue, you need to guard them like nobody's business.

As a CEO, you will definitely have managers, supervisors, and directors, and these people manage the teams that actually do the real work, so you can expect drama.

Those weird dramas, you will need to eliminate or control, otherwise your business will become a toxic work environment.

Since your goal is to grow your business through having the right team, I’ll share, from my own understanding, some signs that can help you catch the early traits of toxicity before your employees get disengaged from their work and slide from being a high performer into becoming an average one.

There is nothing as painful as losing the best talent who has been your revenue driver in your company.

I have even seen some CEOs shedding tears when they see their best hires leaving, so I know what goes on in their thoughts.

So without wasting your precious time, let's discuss some of the key characteristics you should spot and stop before they spread and affect your talent.

1. Consistent 7 - 9pm hours often signal quiet quitting in progress, not extra dedication a casual 1:1 can surface the real issue early.

2. When a manager absorbs an open position into an existing employee's workload instead of hiring, that employee is on a fast track to burnout.

3. A title bump without a real pay review can push a top performer straight into disengagement.

4. "Bare minimum" behavior is a symptom, not the disease. It signals a deeper cultural or motivational problem that needs investigating, not ignoring.

5. Rushed last-minute work and passed-over internal promotions are subtle signs an employee has mentally checked out and may be job hunting.

When you notice an employee staying late until 7pm or 9pm consistently, or sometimes staggering their hours, please arrange a meeting and have a 1:1 discussion with them, either outside the office or somewhere that doesn't feel like a formal meeting.

This will help the person open up about anything going on in their work life, or sometimes even their personal life.

Employees who have started thinking about quietly resigning normally start staying late from work.

When you see there is an open position and the hiring manager of the department has not requested a replacement, and instead only suggests that the role be added to an existing active staff member, you better dig deep and find out the reason and how long this will go on.

If left unquestioned, the department manager might take advantage, and the person who has absorbed the extra role will suffer without saying anything.

It sounds like something small, but when it happens, it normally explodes like wildfire.

So those open positions need to be looked at critically, otherwise you might lose your best talent to burnout.

When a manager brings you a proposal recommending someone for promotion, and the job title is unclear with no real salary review attached, as CEO you need to step in and find out why the title is vague and why there's no pay rise.

If these two things aren't addressed properly, they might push your talent, your true achiever, to quietly become an average employee who does the bare minimum instead of staying a high performer.

So CEOs, you have a lot of work to do here.

Another important sign to spot is when you notice your employees doing the bare minimum. Stop, don't just walk past it, find out why.

When the bare minimum becomes the norm, it affects business productivity and opens the door to workplace toxicity.

The culture gets devalued, people start gossiping and bringing home issues into the workplace, which is very dangerous, and at the end of the month they still show up in your office for their paycheck.

That's the drama behind bare minimum work. If you want your employees to feel like they're part of something they're genuinely glued to, support them, and they’ll give you the revenue they help you generate.

Something else that looks fine on the surface but is actually serious is when an employee delivers work just minutes before closing time or right before lunch break. You need to find out why.

This is usually an employee who has quietly become demoralized.

On the face of it, they look productive, but underneath, their personality and habits have shifted, and they've quietly stopped producing at their real capacity.

Some managers can be quite cheeky, especially with internal promotions.

They'll tell the team there's an open position and invite anyone interested to apply, but when you apply, thinking you're actually in the running, you find someone else has been picked, either from another department or brought in externally.

As CEO, you need to closely monitor this trend, whether it's internal or external hiring, so you can stop the nonsense and guide the manager toward picking the right person honestly.

This is exactly the kind of thing people vent about on Reddit, and it's also where you'll see employees who feel passed over quietly start looking for a job elsewhere.

That's when they become hard to manage, not because they're difficult by nature, but because they've checked out.

So these are the key signs that, as a CEO, you need to check before your workforce splits into two types: the average employee and the real high performers.

It's scary when both groups exist side by side in your organization, because that culture will automatically destroy your business output, your talent will deteriorate, and it will create a bad brand for your business.

So don't allow these bad habits to cripple your business.

If there’re other signs, let me know.

A shift in work hours especially staying unusually late or working irregular hours is often one of the earliest, most visible signs.

Because the extra workload usually lands quietly on an existing employee, who absorbs it without extra pay or recognition, accelerating burnout and resentment.

Push back and ask directly why the title lacks clarity and why no salary review is attached both are needed to keep the promotion meaningful.

4. Is doing the "bare minimum" always a performance problem?

Not necessarily, it's often a symptom of a toxic or demoralizing environment, so the root cause needs investigating rather than just addressing the output.

Monitor them closely for fairness. When employees apply for internal roles but see outside hires favored without transparency, it breeds distrust and drives quiet job searching.