Why Your Good Employees Are Quitting and How To Keep Them
All businesses have some degree of turnover of staff. Even if good employees are completely happy working for your company, they may still decide to leave and for a wide range of reasons. It’s not always about the business itself.
The problem for many companies is that employee turnover can cost time and money in finding replacements.
Why Good Employees Leave
Good employees move on for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s something simple like a change of home and location. A person may want something new to challenge them or they decide to go for a career opportunity your company can’t quite offer. There may also be negative reasons, however, why good employees leave which could be down to the structure and culture of your business.
Feeling valued is important in the workplace. If an employee senses that their voice is not being heard, they may think that your company doesn’t really value their contribution. Similarly, while it’s not always the top priority many people think, if an employee is being underpaid or under rewarded they can certainly feel undervalued.
Good employees generally begin to look elsewhere when their talents aren’t being recognised or they are not being used to their full potential. That’s particularly true for high performing staff who are continually looking to develop new skills or and take on bigger challenges. If they are being denied the chance by your company, they often have no choice but to move on.
A bad experience with a manager can be another major factor in a good employee deciding to leave. Some managers spend more time trying to get their B team in order than worrying about whether they are neglecting their A players, for instance. A skilled worker may get frustrated when they are faced with a micromanager.
People can quit simply because they’ve received a better offer from another company. It could be that your business simply isn’t paying the going rate for this employee or isn’t providing the progression they might expect. While increasing pay can be relatively easy, the biggest issue companies face is making sure the right career progression opportunities are available.
Other employees might leave because the culture in your business doesn’t fit with their values or view of the world. That can happen if you allow problem employees or bad managers to hold sway and don’t make the effort to remove them or at least retrain them.
How to Hang Onto Good Employees
Top talent should be like gold dust to most businesses. It’s in the company’s best interest to retain those who perform well and deliver time and again. Good leadership skills within management teams are integral to this retention. A manager who takes the time to find out what a valued employee is looking for in the future, for instance, is going to be better placed than one who cares more about targets and sees staff as commodities.
Whether you can provide coaching and professional development training for your best employees obviously depends on a number of circumstances. There may be financing and staffing issues and the size of your company might limit what you can achieve. Developing leadership skills for your best employees, however, will not only ensure better retention but build strong connections between employees that will benefit your company for some time to come.
In truth, there are a whole range of measures businesses can put in place to improve retention rates, including incentives, better training and making employees feel more valued. What it takes is focusing less on the employee as an asset and seeing them more individuals whose needs, wants and desires you must understand and try to deliver on.
