Bad Bosses: The Cost of High Turnover from Bad Management

What causes a high turnover rate for a company's employees? In the Great Reshuffle wave, which companies are losing employees and which are attracting new hires? With the labor market as short as it is and supply chains constricting across the board, minimizing the cost of employee turnover is swiftly becoming a top priority.

While providing flexible benefits and a great work-life balance is competitive, a recent?Gallup study?reveals that real systemic turnover problems (and expenses) can often be traced back to one or more bad managers. Gallup found that 50% of 7272 surveyed professionals had quit their job - put in notice and walked out - because of a bad manager. Far more than that have tolerated a bad manager and took the first opportunity to leave quietly.?

A bad boss can have a powerful impact on company costs. Just one bad manager left in position over a team can cost a company millions in hiring and training expenses over years of slowly driving away every member of their team. Sometimes, bad management is a temporary lack of skills and sometimes there is a permanent conflict that will need to be addressed.

Let's examine what makes a bad boss, just how much one bad manager can cost, and how to resolve this turnover cause in your business.

What Makes a Bad Manager?

• Disregard for Staff and Team Wellbeing
• No Concern for Professional Development
• Plays Favorites
• Hands-Off and Micromanaging
• Incompetence and Indecision
• Moods, Tempers, and Abuse
• Bias and Discrimination

A bad manager is someone who shouldn't be in the managing role, who makes work harder instead of easier for their team. Maybe they play favorites and pit team members against each other. Maybe they have moods and scream or accuse on a semi-regular basis. Or perhaps they simply micromanage so tightly that every single team report gets uncomfortable.

A bad manager could have been a great engineer or salesperson once. Maybe they could be a great manager with training, but left unchecked, they will methodically drive away and/or poorly hire team members again and again.

?Bad Managers Degrade Employees in Observable Ways

You can tell the signs of a bad manager from a distance even if you can't see their exact flaws or mistakes up close. Start with high-turnover teams that should be stable. From there, you can often see how a bad manager has degraded employee morale and wellness in recognizable ways. A bad manager can degrade an employee's job satisfaction, dedication, well-being, and performance.?

When all that has reached a critical low, it becomes turnover as team members quit, transfer, and leave as fast as they can.

Job Satisfaction

A bad manager will suck the rewarding feeling from work, even work that their employees love to do. A bad manager my offer no price, provide criticism without feedback, or constantly misjudge how much work their team members can handle. This reduces job satisfaction bit by bit until employees are looking at any other role that might offer some sensation of reward or accomplishment.

Dedication and Commitment

When the work is rewarding - and when hard work isn't recognized, employees on a badly managed team will lose dedication. They will burn out more quickly and stop caring about quality control or work efficiency with as much commitment as they once did. Maintaining a dedicated workforce is essential, and bad managers erode that with surprising swiftness?- from the first moment a new team member is hired or transferred onto their team.

Well-Being

Bad managers often make demands that clearly disregard the wellbeing of their team members. They may demand irregular hours, on-call schedules, or lay down an expectation of unrewarded overtime (which is legally dangerous). They may not bother with good wellness packages or even discourage employees from taking personal and sick time when they need it. This is why one corroborating sign of a poorly managed team is increased chronic health problems.

Bad managers are also often the source of health-impacting stress; sending employees home so frustrated, angry, or berated that they dream of quitting.

Professional Development

Do you have a team that falls behind the others on sending professionals up the ladder? A good manager nurtures the skill development of their team to get a more capable team and someday see each one promoted to their next career stage. If one manager is sending few to no employees through professional development or recommending them for promotions, this can mean there is no growth or support inside that exam management structure.

Performance

Some bad managers even directly reduce the efficiency and performance of their team. Micromanaging, for example, wastes time, adds steps, and increases the stress of every project. Too much micromanaging can cause a project to go over-deadline and the opposite is also true. Too little guidance and teams won't know how to fulfill the performance expected of them or meet the needs of their department.

Turnover

Of course, the biggest impact of a bad manager is the turnover. When a manager makes the work environment toxic, it's no surprise that most employees jump ship as soon as they realize they are working in a toxic office.?

?The Cost of Employee Turnover

How much does one employee turnover cost? The job advertising, recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process typically costs about 1/3 of the role's annual pay, which equals thousands to tens of thousands for every employee a bad manager drives away and gets replaced. Sheltering, ignoring, and failing to address bad managers is no longer an option in the tight hiring market and the new transparency spotlight on employer branding.

A bad manager won't just get negative reviews on Glassdoor, they can impact the growth and even the operating capital of your business if left unchecked.

?How to Solve a Bad Manager Situation

If you've been checking points off the list and realize there's a bad manager in your ranks, there's no time to waste in remedying the situation before they drive one more valuable employee away. However, the next steps may be delicate. You will need to review the situation, the team, the impact, and the salability of the manager.

A well-meaning manager who got a little?too?micro-managerial may just need some management training. But the tyrant who's been making employees dance for sick days will need an escort out the door. You might find a bad manager who should be a project lead or engineer instead - just one lateral promotion to being back on track for their skillset. Or you may find someone promoted well above their ability-level who needs a fresh start with realistic expectations for?their?abilities.

The key is to assess the situation and find the best solution possible for the unique situation found in the wake of every bad manager. Contact Bonfire Consulting Group (www.bonfireconsultinggroup.com) today for a business consultation that can help you get through this difficult yet necessary process to save your turnover rate and resolve bad manager problems.