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You're cruising along comfortably at work. Sometimes you feel a bit bored but you're on top of the tasks at hand and happy to turn up each day. You like your colleagues and the office has a good vibe, so you've no reason to be checking the job ads.

That is until your boss announces she plans to retrain as a teacher, a much-loved workmate announces he is off to save the planet and the colleague who joined the same day as you is poached by the opposition. Suddenly everything seems different.

Sometimes even one key team member leaving can trigger a whole domino effect of staff departures. "Employers are always surprised that, when they introduce redundancies, the talent they wanted to keep leaves as well," says Briton John Lees, the author of How To Get A Job You'll Love. "People may be perfectly content in their job but as soon as they see other people leaving they start to wonder what else is out there."

Australian careers coach Annemarie Cross, from Advanced Employment Concepts, says coping well with an office exodus involves keeping a cool head, stepping back and thinking about what is best for you. In some cases the rash of departures may occur because of a toxic work environment and looking for a new job is the smart course of action. But in other cases, you could benefit from hanging around and capitalising on the clean sweep of staff.

Samantha Sykes worked in a British university marketing office for four years, "all the while not really feeling like I was really using my skills". When her immediate manager announced she was leaving to retrain, it gave Sykes the nudge she needed to visit a careers adviser. "The funny thing is we all seemed to jog along quite happily," she says. "But shortly after I left, one of the other marketing executives decided to go back to university as well." Sykes believes that had her manager not left, she would still be working there.

Similarly Piers Zangana decided to leave his job with a British mental health hospital after his immediate boss left to pursue other interests, despite there being "nothing that was particularly wrong with the job, apart from having no real room for me to develop", he says.

"I had a very good relationship with my boss, so I just thought it made sense for me to go, too," he says. "I was still at the very early stages of my career and it was a case of 'now or never'."

So why do companies get clumps of people all leaving at once? "It's all about leadership," says Andrew Pullman of HR consultancy People Risk Solutions. "If lots of people leave at once, there is clearly a leadership problem."

There are two reasons for the mass exodus phenomenon, Pullman says. The first is when a competitor sets up a business in a similar area: "This creates a forced domino effect, caused by a competitor. It's important to find out what's happening and address it immediately." The second comes from the general unease caused by staff movement. "People start to think, 'Is the job I'm doing something I am actually enjoying? If she isn't enjoying it why is she leaving? Should I be leaving too?"'

Lees agrees that change can have a knock-on effect. And not always in the way employers would like. "A great mistake employers make is thinking that the staff that have stayed are the motivated ones; that they are grateful for the job," he says. "The fact is that when there's a whiff of redundancy in the air or the hint of unease, that's when most people reassess their options."

Lees advises not acting rashly when movement's afoot. "You need to sit down and ask yourself whether now really is the right time to go. Don't make it a knee-jerk reaction."

Cross agrees. She says if an exodus is generated by distress over a change in manager, a natural response is to want to leave. But on reflection some workers may find it a better course of action to stick around and see what opportunities arise. The new boss might be an unknown quantity but he or she could have great ideas.

However, if the situation deteriorates, workers should look for another position that suits them better.