The Real Reasons your Employees are Leaving You

It’s a fact of life that’s all too familiar to recruiters and HR pros alike. Employees come and they go. But as talent acquisition broadens to bring “retention ” into the stable of measurements that we use to gauge our effectiveness, more information on the real reasons employees leave begins to emerge. Organizations are frequently looking to recruit, retain and train their employees – but why?

A recent infographic by Paycom addresses the twin issues of “pull” versus “push”.  And for those who spend their days attracting employees to their organizations, it might come as a surprise that nearly 94% of employees report voluntarily leaving employers for “push” reasons where the motivators were based on dissatisfaction or a desire to leave versus the siren song (or “pull”) of an outside opportunity.

Did you hear that? If your employees are stepping out, it’s because they were pushed away, not tempted. Therefore, you can do something about it. And you should, because the cost of losing an average employee is 1.5x their annual salary and for every top dog that leaves your company, you can lose 2 more high performing employees. And those top performers? They cost 3x what the average employee costs to replace.

Those are scary numbers. So why are your employees leaving you?

They don’t trust you. At least the higher ups. This one hardly comes as a surprise as corporate loyalty has been wearing relatively thin as of late. However, it’s not entirely impossible to turn this around. One of the best ways to instill confidence in higher leadership in your company is by instituting pay for performance throughout your company. Pay for Performance Programs can increase employee retention by 27%.

You’re not paying them enough. Cost of living is rising steadily but take home pay just isn’t and sometimes employees can find better offers elsewhere. It’s tough for organizations to “find money” lying around but there are other ways to create value for your employees. Work-flex time, increased benefits, better training programs to name a few.

Your culture sucks. This is the hardest one to both identify and fix, but it’s costing you big bucks to leave it alone. When you have an unhealthy or undesirable culture within your team or organization, you’re not only at risk of losing your best people but in damaging your employer brand. Pinpointing the issue that’s draining your culture and then excising it will underscore your retention efforts.

You don’t care about their job. So, not to put too fine a point on it, why should they care about your company? Lack of concern for your employees’ development is listed as a top reason with 41% of employees at companies with inadequate training programs planning to leave within a year. In companies that provide excellent training, only 12% of employees want to leave. So start training your employees.

All of this speaks to further aligning business goals with employee goals. AS talent management and talent acquisition draw ever closer, corporate recruiting leaders that focus on areas that traditionally belonged firmly in HR and Management camps: like training, compensation and performance reviews, will find their efforts rewarded by increased retention numbers and better bottom line numbers. In fact, organizations with reward and talent management programs that support their business goals are more
than twice as likely to be high-performing companies.

So what are you waiting for? Get cracking! And be sure to check out part two of this article as well !