Top 10 reasons why your employees leave you - Demystifying Retention

A Love Relationship

This is no conspiracy. Your employees leave you, nobody is taking them away from you. And where should they go if not to your competition:)? Everybody pursuits her happiness. See it as a relationship.

The phase "The only reason an employee leaves you is if she fells out of love with your company. Period." might have sounded a bit dogmatic though.

Here is the vulgarized research that puts it all together. I do not give you yet specific numbers as promissed in my Machiavell article. These are studies done by several research departments of Statistics Canada, Gallup polls, the UK's Labour Research Department, etc. All this is combined with my team's expertise in HR, industrial psychology and project management.


A mystifying Retention problem

Just about yesterday a good friend ( Hi Pat :) ) was telling me: "I just lost a key employee and I don't understand why since I have created for her all the conditions to be happy... She had a flexible schedule, good pay, even the privilege of informing the clients about the resolution of their problems. "

It should be noted that employees do not have the same reasons for staying as for leaving. They will stay for good management (performance, wellness, care and prevention) and if that is gone they will leave for a better pay. Also there is a dissonance between why employees leave and what employers think employees leave for. You cannot keep an employee only with money, you keep her with good leadership, wellness, prevention and care. Beware, care does not only mean a tap on the back...when you care about your employee you will do everything you can to offer her respectable rewards also...


Top 10 reasons your employees leave you

1. Employee is not in the right job
- Hiring error
- Management error of not acknowledging this asap and try to reposition the employee
- this goes hand-in-hand with 7 (job definition) and 8 (future and development plan)

2. Excessive workload and hours
- Bad direct management in scheduling.

Reason #1 people stay is good management. Once that is gone they will run to the first company that opens its door with a competitive salary.

Ok here I don't want to hear that the client asks for more with less, that the company does not pay overtime, that these are strategic projects, that the project manager does not have the authority to step in, etc.

One point is clear: all of the above are risks that should be clearly stated to higher management. You cannot have the most exhaustive project scope and then disproportional time and money.
Every project manager should create his generic timeline and then apply to it all the above constraints. The higher management should be aware that the stain on the teams is costing more than a difficult client or a bad manager.

On another note, clients are people too, and they are easier to manage that one may think. They are sensitive to honesty and excellence. A good account or project manager will understand and prioritize clients' needs. But that's another story.

3. Not enough recognitions
- Direct supervisors do not verbally appreciate the worker.
Managers! just look the person in the eye and say THANK YOU!!! - you shouldn't be screaming though :), I am screaming because this should be so obvious.
- No financial incentives - if you are not able to give financial incentives to your employees means:

a. Your company is not profitable
-- You have a problem with your business model
-- Or you have incompetent workers - but they won't really expect financial incentives anyways

b. You just think that you found a brilliant way of making money: you minimize next to zero the incentives thus maximizing the value that the employees create for you.
This is great, but if you are making profit and yet you are not giving anything back to your employee you deserve to lose them. And should I remind you that losing employees means you lose money! Oh, this is getting so complicated... see Work and Life - Minimize Turnover

4. No support mechanism in the workplace
- Supervisor unavailable or has no empathy
- Coworkers unavailable - because of excessive workloads or bad office infrastructure or some other organizational policies, etc.
- Useless and untargeted 'bonding activities'. These should be strategically focused towards solving specific team issues not just promiscuously getting people together over wine and champaign...

5. No meaning in the job
- Humans are not robots. Humans need meaning in order to create and to feel fulfilled. A salary may be a way to sustain one's family but if the work itself has no meaning it might as well be any work...

6. Personal conflicts
- Supervisors unable to solve interpersonal disputes
- Inexistent conflict resolution policy
- Managers push employees into gray zones without clarifying the decision process (see next point)

7. Unclear job definition
- Employee doesn't understand what is expected of her or how these expectancies help her chasing her career goal
- Conflicts created by wrong job description and lack of policies that clarify the gray zones between jobs and the way to tackle them (see point 2 Gray zones where working processes overlap in 6 reasons why your corporate problem is in the organization chart)

8. Employee does not see any future for her in the company - no development plan
- No clear development plan nor regular evaluations
- Bad supervising
- Bad communication

9. No job security - Flawed top-down communication

a. Simply put: your company is going nowhere... wrong business model.

b. Your company is doing well but your employees do not see it.

- Top-down communication about company's future and vision is not done only in general meetings and emails.
- Effective top-down communication is complete when every level of management understands, buys and sells it to its teams. If a top VP does not have buy-in at all levels of management (especially the floor level) the communication is useless.
- Communication with no buy-in has a backslash: managers do not believe it and they become cynical about it. And cynicism if repeated and in combination with workload and overtime becomes a strong burnout dimension.

10. Stressful work environment
- any of the above 9 steps
- Unclear wellness and prevention policy and implementation
- No conflict resolution policy and implementation
- Managers don't know how to detect stress nor burnout
- Disrespectful actions - no recognition, bullying, management by fear see About Leadership and Turnover - Fear vs Love in Machiavelli - Why love finally wins...
- No love


Solutions?

Obviously these are generic points that have to be analyzed individually.

Your company needs a tailored diagnostic, solution and implementation.

Be careful. There are several companies and consultants that will offer you plenty of solutions from technological to yoga and from 360 assessments to weird rope games.
Almost no company offers you the guaranty that their interventions will work. Simply because their business model focuses on specific disciplines (psychometrics, rope games, yoga, .Net programming) and not on your need, which is employee retention.

Should you want to know more drop a comment and I'll get back to you.

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Results from Labour Research Department for the CWU, Perspectives on Labour and Income - Statistics Canada, Health Reports - Statistics Canada, Gallup, Survey. com


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Octavian Mihai