5 Reasons Your Employees are Abandoning Your Company

Employees – even ones in quite senior positions with lucrative salaries – quit for any number of seemingly less than significant reasons. Still, the reasons are important enough for the employee to make a life-changing decision and… it can have a dramatic effect on you and your company. Here are five of the top reasons why good employees will abandon an otherwise good company:

1. Offering No Passable Relationship with a Superior
While subordinates do not necessarily need to fraternize with their bosses – in fact, it is actively discouraged in most organizations – they do require a comfortable working relationship with their superior to be effective. Simply put, an uncomfortable relationship with one’s immediate supervisor is an almost unbearable burden on any employee as they must depend on the boss to give relevant input and feedback in many one-on-one situations. An immediate supervisor is also an employee’s access to the rest of the management chain. It is highly demoralizing to be left aside in this instance. In short, a poor relationship with one’s superior quickly devolves into the need to find a new job.

2. Ignoring Good Relationships with Peers
Similarly but not identically, an employee must have a good working relationship with their peers. A large portion of one’s working life will be spent sitting next to, interacting with, and generally spending the day with these people. It is imperative that coworkers communicate and empower each other. Many mutual friendships are developed in a working environment – do not discount the retention effect that employees have on each other. In short, interpersonal peer-to-peer relationships retain employees more than any other factor.

3. No Relevancy of Their Position
Everyone wants to be relevant – to their family, to their friends and, yes, to their employers. It is simply human nature and ignoring this fact will cost you employees – the best ones, too! To this end, an employee must be given meaningful work and the more senior the employee the more relevant it needs to be. Making a difference – at the company level and for the world at large – is essential for motivating the most passionate employees. Otherwise, they will move on to circumstances more attuned to their own ethical views. If necessary, you may have to re-evaluate your own views and determine if they are too mercenary.

4. Denying Autonomy and Independence
On a slightly different note, the best employees do not want to be treated as children. That is, they want to be trusted and not just considered incompetents who will only do as instructed with a maximum of oversight. In other words, to retain the best employees your company must do more than just pay lip service to such concepts as empowerment, self-direction and independence. While you cannot actually endow your employees with these traits, you can create a working environment that nurtures them. If you do, you and your company, as well as your retention rate, will be all the better for it.

5. Lack of Recognition
Other than a superior outright taking credit for a subordinate’s work, nothing aggravates an employee more than not being recognized for his contributions. It can be as simple as thanking them for working on the weekend to an actual award for being employee of the month. With that said, genuine gratitude is appreciated but your company must come across with some tangible rewards or the sentiment will soon be ignored. HRIS can increase acknowledgment by using technology to communicate recognition and interactivity throughout the company. Remember, the best know who they are and that they have other employment options.

The Bottom Line
Pay attention to these five reasons or you will certainly be giving more exit interviews and goodbye parties – not to mention substantially increasing your recruiting, hiring and training costs.

For more on this topic, please visit us at compareHRIS.com, where you can find a range of products that can help you with any of your human resource issues.