Reasons for employee turnover and how to eliminate them.

Employee turnover negatively impacts the organisation by increasing hiring costs, consuming recruiters’ time, and discouraging other employees.
Wetumwene Shikage
Along with lack of career development, work-life balance, and manager behaviour as the top categories, there are other essential reasons. They include wrong hiring strategy, toxic culture, lack of attachment to the company values and goals, and employee burnout, partly caused by the new reality coming along with the pandemic. Let’s focus on the substance of each of these reasons and explore how to prevent high employee turnover rates.

#1 Poor hiring strategy

Hiring quality talents requires a solid recruiting strategy and time, and it’s totally worth it. A wrong hire gets seriously expensive, and besides increasing the employee turnover rate. The recruiting error may lead to the workplace’s tainting and even damaging of a company reputation.

Behind the poor hiring decisions, there are typically impulsive hires, overlooking the red flags, and desire to close the opening asap. Along with that, hiring managers and recruiters may not have enough information about critical requirements and the entire vision of the kind of person to fill the position.

Solution: Optimise your hiring strategy

To prevent bad hiring decisions and high staff turnover due to this reason:

Take a step back and examine your candidate persona.

Make sure it’s aligned with business needs and company culture.

Ensure the hiring process is straightforward, and your hiring team has tools and a shared vision on how to source and evaluate the candidates.

#2 Lack of professional development

This is one of the key high turnover rate causes. Employees naturally look for career growth. This aspiration means not solely financial growth but mostly professional development. Hence, if you don’t offer your employees’ career development vectors, most likely, you’ll see them leave in a while.

Solution: Create professional development programmes

To address this issue:

Think of developing clear career paths, starting training and mentorship programmes, and encouraging employees to participate in related conferences.

#3 Weak attachment with company vision and goals

Along with career growth, people want their work to have a purpose, and ideally, to see how their particular input brings changes for the better of the entire organisation. Unfortunately, it happens that C-suite and employees exist in parallel realities. Often, due to a lack of understanding of the attachment role and poor communication within a company, people start feeling like their work has no meaning and thus look for other job opportunities elsewhere, contributing to volunteer employee turnover.

Solution: Bring in more transparency

To cope with this issue:

Start sharing big picture company goals and valid interim results regularly.

Re-think the approach to goal-setting to help employees get a shared vision.

Pay close attention to public recognition of individual and team successes.

Help your people get an authentic sense of purpose and that will encourage them to stay motivated and productive.

#4 Toxic workplace culture

Toxic culture is one of the reasons that can literally skyrocket employee turnover. When people feel constantly stressed out, ignored, afraid to make a minor mistake, or experience bullying at work, most likely, they will lose motivation and won’t see themselves staying with their current employer.

Solution: Make a plan to make the company culture healthier

To prevent the growing employee turnover due to workplace culture issues:

Perform pulse surveys to understand how happy or demotivated your employees feel, collect feedback from them.

In case the workplace culture at your organisation needs to become healthier, come up with an action plan to make improvements.

#5 Employee burnout

The last but not least aspect causing employee turnover is burnout, which gets increasingly crucial along with the pandemic. Some employees shift to working remotely and literally “live at work”. Others feel as if they don’t have enough working hours to cope with their jobs. The employees, overloaded with work, start feeling stressed and burned out, and that may push them to quit and look for the workplace offering them better work-life balance.

Solution: Re-think work scope distribution

To help employees cope with stress and decrease employee turnover:

Make sure there are no kinks in work distribution across the company.

Perform pulse surveys to understand if employees are on the brink of burnout.

If it appears that most of the employees are overloaded with work, think of hiring more staff.

https://www.hrforecast.de/2020/12/31/reasons-for-employee-turnover-and-how-to-eliminate-them/?cookie-state-change=1615427030625