Nobody quits on the day they quit
It is decided weeks earlier, in the sessions they skip while nobody is looking. What to measure to catch it in time, over what window, and what the number will not tell you.
The message arrives on a Tuesday afternoon and it is always politely written: "hey, I'm going to stop this month, maybe I'll pick it up again later". And it almost always catches you by surprise.
What is no surprise is what was behind it. Look back and they had spent five weeks training two days out of four. They did not quit on Tuesday. Tuesday is when you found out.
Adherence, with no mystique
Sessions logged divided by sessions planned, over a period. A percentage. That is all.
It sounds so simple that it seems not to need explaining, which is why it gets done badly. Before that number means anything you have to make three decisions, and they are the three that get skipped.
1. What counts as done
Does half a session count? If it counts in full, someone who does three sets and leaves scores the same as someone who finishes. If it counts for nothing, you punish the one who turned up with a fever and lasted half an hour. The one person you did not want to punish.
There is no right answer, but there is a rule: pick one and do not change it. A percentage is only useful if it can be compared with last month's.
The option that goes wrong least often is to count a session as done as soon as it is logged, and look at volume separately. "Did they train?" and "how much did they move?" are two different questions, and folding them into one number leaves you with neither.
2. Over what window
The most common mistake is including the current week.
If you look on Monday morning and the week in progress is in the count, everyone is at 0%. On Tuesday, 25%. That number does not tell you who has slipped: it tells you what day it is. And since the alarm goes off for everybody every Monday, you stop looking at it.
Measure over completed weeks. Four is usually a good window. One odd week (a bug, a trip) sets nothing off, and a real drop still shows before it is too late. One week on its own is noise. Twelve is archaeology.
3. What you compare against
Against themselves. Not against the rest of your roster.
Someone who has trained three days out of four for six months does not have an adherence problem: that is their adherence, and they are progressing on it. Put them next to someone who hits four out of four and you get a warning where nothing happened.
What matters is the drop. The one who was at 90% and has spent three weeks at 50% is the real warning, even though that 50% is still higher than two other people's.
Why asking does not work as a sensor
"How was your week?" "Fine."
They are not lying to you. "Fine" is what people answer. You are also asking the one person who is already uncomfortable about it, in writing, where it is easiest to soften.
Asking is how you talk. It is not how you measure. The same conversation is good for one of those and useless for the other.
What to do with the number, and what not to
It starts a conversation. It is not a grade. Do not show it to them as a scoreboard: a low percentage in front of someone who already feels bad about not going is the fastest way to stop hearing from them at all.
The useful conversation starts with the cause, not the figure. And the cause is almost never the plan. It is the shift that got moved, the child who fell ill, the small niggle they did not mention so as not to make a fuss.
Sometimes the right answer is to go from four days to three. A four-day plan that gets half done returns less than a three-day plan that gets done, and it wears people out along the way.
What the number does not tell you
- It does not tell you why. It only tells you where to look.
- It cannot see nutrition or sleep: you can train all four days on five hours a night.
- It is useless for the first two weeks. Everyone is at 100% and it means nothing.
- And it does not prevent people leaving. Someone moving cities is leaving anyway.
All that changes is when you find out
In week two there is still room for a conversation, for moving a day, for dropping the one that never gets done. By week six you are not retaining anyone. You are receiving a politely written message on a Tuesday afternoon.
And if you run all this in a spreadsheet today, answering "who has slipped?" costs you fifteen open tabs and a comparison by eye. That has an article of its own too: the spreadsheet holds until things go well.