6 Reasons Why Great Employees Leave

Employees are the lifeblood of any organisation. Although there are numerous job seekers out there, the process of selecting the right talent for your organisation can be a lengthy and expensive process. Great employees play a critical part in an organisation’s ability to function, flourish, and grow. New entrepreneurs often underestimate the time and effort it takes to create a positive, stable and healthy workforce. While it may be acceptable to operate without clear processes in the early days, organisations eventually need to create structure and transparency to build a sustainable business.

Among the myriad business challenges and intricacies of leading a business, people management can be significantly more complex that initially imagined. Therefore, being aware of the some of the common reasons that great employees may chose to leave the business is critical to help preempt possible solutions to address them. Here are the top 6 reasons why great employees may leave an employer or an organisation.

1. Lack of Trust

Building strong relationships with your team is essential to a long trusting tenure with the organisation. This can be done by being clear about the processes and criteria to hire new staff and ensuring that you have clear documentation in process to outline employer-employee obligations and roles and responsibilities towards each other in a transparent fashion. This way, employees know what to expect from the working relationship while also understanding the expectation from their contributions. This can achieved through HR Policies and Procedures that outlines the clearly outlines the people operational practices of the business.

2. Poor Leadership

Effective leadership can bolster and promote teamwork and inspires their team through clear purpose and direction. On the other hand however, the impact of poor leadership is low employee morale, a decreased ability to build a sustainable experience because of a high turnover. With good leadership, you can truly inspire people to translate vision into reality. If you reflect on some of the most successful businesses to date, the one element they all have in common is visionary leadership. This can be achieved by taking on a Leadership Coach or Consultant to help navigate the complex world of people management, create a vision and can motivate people to make it a reality.

3. Workplace Culture Deterioration

Studies have shown that up to one-third of job seekers give up their dream job if they learn that the corporate culture is poor. In fact, in a recent survey of job-seekers on Jobvite, who had left a job within the first 90 days, 32% stated company culture as the main reason. The question then is, what is workplace culture? Think about it as the basic assumptions (often informal) held by the employees of an organisation which influence the way they behave. An effective way to create a strong positive culture is to have a clear set of values, use it to guide key decisions and to hold employees accountable when decisions are not made in line with these values.

4. An Inept Manager

People Management is a unique skill – it takes time, effort and is definitely not for the faint hearted. It is often said that people don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers. A simple but often omitted step the appointment of a manager is the training process that gives them the resources and tools to be an effective manager in line with the company values. This can be done as an addition to the Orientation/Induction program if the manager is a new joiner or an independent managerial training program for employees newly promoted as managers.

5. Lack of Appreciation

In order for employees to perform in line with expectations, it is important to give them timely feedback. Generally, feedback is only given when things go ‘wrong’. However, it is equally important to provide timely appreciation feedback for a job well-done. This allows employees to better understand what they should do more of and what they should do less of i.e. stop, start or continue. A simple way to do this is during a weekly one-to-one with the team member. Managers can take the first few minutes to acknowledge and recognise accomplishments during the week. In addition, companywide reward and recognition program also support the creation of an appreciative culture where employees feel seen and valued.

6. Unhealthy Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance means recognising that your employees have lives outside of the office which require their time and attention too. Employees who believe their ogranisation supports their personal life outside of work, whether it is through creating a practice of not calling employees after work hours or supporting them to pursue a sport of interest, are more engaged, motivated, and invested in the interests of the organisation. Some simple tips to promote a healthy work life balance are to encourage employees to unplug their ‘work-technology’, exercise meditate and pursue other interest that allows them to mentally break away from work activities.