What makes great employees quit?

What makes great employees quit?

Talent acquisition is high on any hiring manager’s agenda. That new project is underway, growth rates are healthy and you’re getting a steady number of new recruits through the door. But why are team numbers thinning amongst the longer serving employees? A good growth strategy and recruitment plan (whether in-house or via a recruitment partner) are key to operational efficiency, but if you can’t retain your existing employees, all that work goes right out of the window. It can highly costly and very disruptive when people quit, leaving that project unfinished, team numbers down and a headache for the coming months.

We’ve all hear the old saying, ‘People don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad bosses’, so below we take a look at the top 5 bad manager traits that may leave your employees trawling the job boards when they leave the office.

1. You micromanage like there’s no tomorrow 

Micromanaging is a common trait among many managers and can help get a lot done in times of tight deadlines. However, obsessive micromanagement can leave employees feeling untrusted and undervalued. As the great leader Steve Jobs once said, “We don’t hire great staff so we call tell them what to do, we hire great staff so they can tell us what to do”. This is highly relevant to micromanaging – Have faith in the strengths that they have (the reason why you hired them), rather than trying to control everything they do.

 2. You overwork staff

 It’s very tempting to overwork your best staff, it happens to the best of us. They get the job done quick and efficiently, so giving them more work makes perfect sense right? Yes, but to a point. A recent research study has shown that anything above a 50 hour week, actually decreases productivity with work over 55 hours per week, really becoming non-existent. 

3. You hire and promote the wrong people 

In today’s working environment; the era of collaboration, employees want to work with and alongside like-minded individuals. When your senior employee’s aren’t pulling their weight and setting the example, it leaves the team demotivated and frustrated. Promoting the wrong person who doesn’t pull their weight will be a massive insult to your hard workers, and they run or the exit the first chance they get.

4. You misunderstand the dynamics of your team

Every employee is different, and will work in different ways and respond the different management styles.  If you are one of those bosses that keeps tarring everyone with the same brush or keeps putting people together who don’t get along well or who take drastically different approaches to a task, you might want to reconsider how you can make the most of your team’s strengths.

5. You don’t allow room for progression or development. 

When employees determine their career path, it is often accompanied with gradual progression - It’s an inherent trait of hard workers to want to better themselves. When you have a talented employee, it’s up to you to keep finding areas in which they can improve to expand their skill set. The most talented employees want feedback—more so than the less talented ones—and it’s your job to keep it coming. If you don’t, your best people will grow bored and complacent.

 It is important to bring all these points together and create a culture where your employees feel valued and like they have a future. It is important to remember that one size does not fit all, so try them one by one and see what results you get.

 What other bad habits cause employees to leave? Have you had any personal experience with any of the above – Feel free to share your story with me.

 Andrew Morris

Real Estate & Facilities Specialist