High Turnover: 4 Reasons It’s Your Fault

 Time. Training. Resources. Energy. These are all things you are wasting when you have a high staff turnover rate. Sometimes, employees aren’t even fully trained before they decide to leave. Staff members learn what they can from your company, or all they can tolerate, then they pick up and leave. It can be disheartening to managers, colleagues and executives alike. As a recruiter or HR pro, it brings in additional accountability issues and frustration at a never ending requisition pile. Suffering from separation anxiety as a manager? Fifty-seven percent of companies see retention as a problem, so maybe something should be done about it. The problem: The finger is pointing at you. Your company is the problem, and it could be any one of these four things.

Unreasonable Workloads

High employee turnover should set off the alarms for your managers. Why? Because it could be a sign employees are taking on too much. High workloads  can mean taking work home regularly just to keep the pace. Now, there will always be those occasions when taking work home is a must, but it should not be a regular event. You can do this by streamlining projects, hiring part-timers to file and do the menial work, or even giving projects to teams to work on together. At the very least, prioritize projects and assignments for your employees so they know which task is most important. Pay attention to redundant work and ensure that you aren’t giving multiple projects to a strong employee just because “they can handle it!”

Bad Managers

It seems a little counterproductive to spend money and time training someone to prevent the loss of training and time. Many managers have not learned the skill of interpersonal communication, a key skill when supervising employees or connecting with colleagues. Bad managers who don’t communicate with their employees are more likely to push those employees away from the company. When you train your managers, you train your employees as well and they are kept happy. Kimber Crumlish writes, “…of the 46^% of [new hires] who failed within that first 18 months, 89% of the time it was for attitudinal reasons, and a mere 11% of the time for lack of skill.” This means, your employees come into positions with the ability to learn, but they leave because their managers are not trained well in interpersonal communication.

Lack of Competitive Pay

If you aren’t paying your employees for the workloads you give them, you can’t expect them to stay. Eighty-three percent of companies gave their employees raises. Go ahead and join the crowd, give your employees incentive to stay put. A survey conducted by PayScale says, “88 percent of companies say they plan to give pay raises, with the average raise expected to be 4.5 percent.” If you don’t think you can pay them more, at least give them some good benefits. Do you give them sick pay, vacation time, and other employee perks? The question is not can you afford to but can you afford NOT to? Seeking a better paycheck  was one of the top reasons employees left their jobs in 2013.

A Stressful Work Environment

“A continual exodus of talent can indicate a stressful, unstable work environment,” says Ralph Heibutzki of EverdayLife.com. The constant firing and hiring of people doesn’t provide a very solid environment to work in. And the fact of the matter is, people like stability. The stressful environment in a work atmosphere is really a combination of lack of benefits, unappreciated work, bad managers, and unreasonable workloads. Take a look around your work environment and try to pinpoint the “bad apples” who are stressing out your workers.

These are really easy fixes. There is no reason to continue to have these problems in your company if you suffer from high turnover. Break up your employees’ workloads so they aren’t doing everything alone. Implement a training program for managers, so those who don’t have the best people skills can still be good managers. Wonderful things happen when you mend these problems—you keep your employees and your productivity shoots through the roof.