Good point. I know this as the Mack Truck Theory. For the project I'm working on right now, there's a couple of incredibly valuable people that would cause a pretty significant issue if they disappeared.
Sensitive workplaces (which seems like most these days) have taken to calling this the Lottery Factor (as in team members quit bc they hit the lottery) to spare more delicate types the pain of imagining their peers run over in traffic accidents.
Having been in the situation that a coworker did no longer arrive to work one morning because some person opened the car door when they were passing with their motorcycle, I can assure you that it's not only the more delicate type of people that all of a sudden are a bit more quiet than usual.
There's advantages to both terms. Bus factor maintains the (possible) fiction that people care about their coworkers/bosses enough that they'd transition out if they had the choice. Bus factor highlights that there's no way to get that information even if the person is nice enough to help for effectively free.
I work in the EEO/AAP space and can confirm our company calls it the Lottery Factor though it is partially because we do an office lotto pool when it gets big and jokes bled over. However it is much nicer for discussions. What will we do when employee x gets hit by a bus just does not sound good to random people walking by.
Almost lost a co-worker when he got hit by a bus five years ago. He's back at work full time now, with a substantial settlement from the transit agency (nice amount of f** you money). He wasn't an essential employee, but was important to our team in many ways. Fortunately he was always willing to joke about his accident. He'd survived, after all!
>Sounds like those people are in strong negotiation positions
You'd be surprised, but that's not necessarily the case.
One of my friends was such a person in a shoe making company as a designer. Instead of giving her a raise, they fired her.
Cue them re-hiring her a month or two later after they found out the hard way that the less experience subordinate really couldn't handle the job of the two of them on their own.
