If you’re a manager, here’s an interesting and potentially enlightening exercise. Think back over the last three people on your team who quit their jobs. These need to be individuals who left voluntarily, not ones you fired or laid off. Then answer this simple question:

“Did you see it coming?”

Because in most cases, you should have. People rarely make hasty decisions when it comes to resigning, and they almost always start showing signs that they aren’t satisfied well before they make a move. Yet I routinely talk with managers who claim to have been blindsided by the departure of an employee they thought was perfectly happy and now find themselves scrambling to find a replacement for a job they aren’t prepared to fill.

But you know what I usually find when I take a closer look at these situations? The manager wasn’t paying attention at all. He or she was too busy with other activities and, as a result, failed to do some key things that might have raised a red flag indicating a retention problem was brewing.

If you take the time to really get to know your team members, you should understand what they need to get out of their work in order to stay motivated and happy. You should know if their compensation is satisfactory to meet their needs or if they’re struggling to get by on what they’re making. You should know if they find their primary job duties interesting and challenging or boring and annoying. You should know if they enjoy working with the other people on the team or view them as a necessary evil. You should know if they feel appreciated and valued or if they leave work each day already dreading coming back the next morning.

And you need to know where they’d like to go career-wise. Do they aspire to move up the organizational chart, or would they rather stay in their current jobs but have opportunities to learn, grow, and take on additional responsibilities? Where would they like training, coaching, or mentoring, and what are you doing to make sure they get it? Because if you can’t or won’t help them achieve their professional goals, at some point they’ll probably start looking for someone who will.

So how do you develop the kinds of relationships with your employees where they tell you about all these things? The easiest way I know, hands down, is by having weekly, one-on-one meetings with each of them to open up the lines of communication. The meetings should be short (no more than 20 minutes or so), informal, and the agenda should be up to the team member. Ask your people to keep a list of things they want to talk about: ideas they have, issues they need help with, stuff that’s bugging them. Then each week sit down and give them your undivided attention. Go over their lists and address each item. Ask them what’s working and what’s not. Talk about their victories over the past week as well as their struggles.

But here’s the important part: Really pay attention to what they say and how they say it. Watch their body language and tone of voice for signs of tension, stress, and frustration. Notice what topics make them smile and charge them up. If you do these meetings week in and week out, you should find that your team members start to open up and tell you more than just the basics.

Best of all, you’ll be able to much more easily spot the signs of a developing morale problem, identify what’s behind it and, hopefully, head it off before it becomes significant enough to motivate them to take another job.

I realize sometimes managers simply can’t do anything about issues that have the potential to drive an employee away. You may lose someone because there’s no promotion opportunity, no room in the budget for a raise, no quick fix for the outdated software they claim makes doing their job twice as hard as it should. But at least in these instances you’ll know what might be coming and can prepare accordingly by developing a pipeline of potential candidates in case you need to start interviewing.

Because no matter how much you like surprises, I’ll bet this is one you could do without.

Janna Mansker is vice president of client services for Berke, a human resources consulting firm, where she leads the company’s education initiatives and advocates for clients. She can be reached at janna@berkegroup.com.