Some reasons good employees leave — and how you can prevent it

Talent is your biggest asset, and while you’ll never eliminate employee turnover, the following strategies can help you keep your best.

Analyzing the problem should be like playing with a matryoshka doll, start from the outside and reach the core of the problem.

When good employees leave, productivity sinks, morale suffers and colleagues struggle with increased workloads. Add in recruitment and training costs, and onboarding new hires can make for a difficult and expensive transition.

The best solution is to keep your workers happy so they don’t leave. But before you can implement a plan to increase employee retention, you need to determine why valuable employees are leaving. Here are the most common reasons employees jump ship to new employers.

They’re not engaged

Many organizations believe they have a “grace period” during which workers will stay with them. That window is shrinking, however, as technology and transparency enable employees to more easily research companies, culture and opportunities, and make applying for jobs much more simple.

Management mishaps

“Most people don’t quit their jobs; they quit their managers,”

Understanding that your organization’s management philosophy could be part of the problem is the first step to improving retention.

“When you lose your top talent, the first place to look is at management”.

“Managing teams as a whole is hard. You have to manage to each individual, and invest time into discovering what each member of a team needs both at work and outside of work to do their job to the best of their ability.”

Unprepared managers

It’s not uncommon for a manager to be a highly talented technician ill-equipped to deal with the demands and nuances of management.

Skills that make an employee a great software developer or coder, for example, are completely different from those required for management. You need to provide the necessary training and guidance to help your managers lead and manage their teams.

No room to grow

One of the main reasons top performers leave is because they feel their career advancement isn’t going as planned.

“It doesn’t matter if they like what they’re working on, who they’re working with and are compensated fairly or more than fairly,”

Your mission is muddled

If employees don’t understand what the organization’s, or their department’s, goals are, or what their role is in the overall strategy, chances are, they will not be as engaged. Having a strong set of corporate values, a mission statement and specific goals (for the company, departments, teams and individuals) can help direct employees’ energy and help them see how their individual contributions are part of a greater whole.