I’ve left a lot of jobs over the course of my career, and I’ve had a lot of people I’ve supervised leave me. If there is one thing I’m found from all these departures, it’s this: Quitting a job is almost always awkward and difficult for all involved.

Advertising Age, a sister publication of Workforce Management, tackled this issue recently with an interesting story on “The Right Way to Tell Your Employer You’re Leaving.” It gave some great “tips for leaving [your job] without severing your relationships,” and while that’s important for employees, it brings up a different question for the readers of this blog: How do managers and executives successfully deal with departures of the people who work for them?

It’s a relevant question because how an organization deals with departing employees sends a powerful message to the rest of the workforce about how they can expect to be dealt with when the time comes for them to walk out the door. And if workers don’t believe that their employer will treat them as well on their last day of work as they do on the first day on the job, well, you can kiss your employee engagement scores goodbye.

So, here are some Business of Management Boss Basics you should consider when it comes to employees and dealing with their inevitable departure:

• Make sure you’re never surprised by a departure. There are probably always going to be times when someone’s departure is like a bolt from the blue, but a critical part of your role as a manager is to stay in close contact with your staff to know how they feel, what they’re doing and who might be likely to depart. If you find that you are often caught off guard when people leave, you just aren’t as engaged with them as you should be.

• Always work on your “What if?” planning. Managers always need to be thinking three or four steps down the road, always asking themselves, “What if?” It means having a contingency plan in place for what you might do if someone decides to leave. Just like a football team knows who will step in at quarterback if the starter and backup both get hurt, you need to have plans, if not on paper, then at least in your head, for what you will do— no matter who might leave your staff. Succession planning is part of this, of course, but this goes beyond that, and it basically means having done some thinking on how to replace, or cover for, every single member of your staff.

• Focus your compensation and rewards on your “can’t lose” people. You want to keep everyone on your staff, but face it: There are some people who are so critical to what you do that you just can’t afford to lose them. So make sure you treat them that way. Can only give limited raises this year? Well, make sure you find a way to get the lion’s share of the raise pool to the “can’t lose” group. Yes, you want to reward everyone, but if you have to make tough choices, center those choices around keeping the “can’t lose” crowd happy, because you would much rather lose a good but nonessential person than the employee who is helping to hold everything together.

• Think through how you will handle departures before people depart. I’ve worked at places where managers were schizophrenic in how they dealt with departures. One person resigning had to pack up and be escorted off the premises within the hour. The next week, another person was allowed to give a two-week notice and had plenty of time to wrap things up and say goodbye. Others on the staff wondered—rightly—why these situations were handled so differently. No one had a good answer. Figure out how you are going to handle departures and let people know what the policy is. If you have to change the policy for some reason, even for a special case, have the decency to let the rest of the staff know why.

My experience is that departures are always tough, even when someone is leaving for a better opportunity. Too many managers don’t think of them as a management opportunity that needs close attention, so they handle them badly, if they handle them much at all.

Managing is easy when times are good, the organization is hiring and everything is positive. Any idiot with a modicum of brain activity can manage reasonably well under those circumstances. The real test of management skill is dealing with the tough stuff that gets tossed on your plate, and successfully handling the ebb and flow of workers is part of that.

So make sure you handle departures with as much time and energy as you give arrivals. It will help build a culture of dignity and caring in your workplace. More important, it will tell everyone in your workforce that they are as important to you on the day they depart as they are on the day they begin. And that is a powerful message that makes for a workforce that everyone will want to be a part of.