Why Employees Leave (Employee Turnover/Attrition)
In an opinion poll, the most popular response was: “employees leave for better job prospects”.
The next most popular response was: “Not happy in the existing work place.”
When we analyze both the response, we find that, employees begin to disengage and think about leaving when their employment does not satisfy one or more of the six fundamental human needs:
- Leaving for Integrity or Self Respect: Sounds strange, but is often the reason in course of mergers and acquisitions of two or more corporate entities. In this situation, often employees, who are unable to cope with the major changes that take place in the form of policies, procedures and functions, prefer to leave the organization.
- Need for Sustenance: The most valid reason for the employees from the grass-root level is the lack of resources, financial or otherwise, that do not provide enough sustenance for the employee and his/her family to exist.
- The need for Trust: When the organization does not keep to the promises it makes to the employees say, in terms of incentives and compensations, which is also reflected in lack of open and rather effective channels of official communication. This finally makes employee feel being treated rather unfairly by the organization and eventually questions the organization’s integrity.
- The need to have Hope: When an employee realises that he has no scope to grow, develop his skills on the job and through training, and have the opportunity for career advancement or career progress leading to higher earnings in the organization.
- The need for real sense of worth: When an organization counts an employee as a cost head and not a revenue earner, the employee then works work hard, does his best and demonstrates his commitment to make meaningful contributions in revenue generation; yet, if he is not recognized and rewarded accordingly, which means the organization does not consider the employee a valued asset to the organization. This eventually affects the employees' sense of worth and self respect, resulting in attrition.
- The need to feel competent: The axiom: “One gets promoted to the position to prove he is worthy of it” at times does not hold good when an employee, in spite of meeting all the challenges, effectively using insights based on his experience and necessary training gets a below par formal performance assessment feedback. Often service break(s) are cited as a limsy reason and the employee continues to serve in the same capacity for longer duration than can be expected from him.
The ten most frequently mentioned reasons for leaving the employment are:
1. Poor Management also in terms of ineffective change management.
2. Lack of career growth and advancement opportunity
3. Poor Channels of communication
4. Office politics
5. Lack of Recognition
6. Poor Senior Leadership
7. Lack of training and knowledge sharing.
8. Excessive workload/multi-tasking
9. Lack of infrastructure and technology
10. Lack of teamwork.
We also need to keep in mind that, while all employees want trust, hope, worth and competence, they may differ in prioritising them at any given time. This may depend on their age, experience or tenure with the organization, for example, as with young employees; career growth in the company may be paramount. Older workers may be more concerned about the health-care benefits. When it comes down to engaging and retaining employees at a time, effective managers will respect these differences. In case you are curious about this facet of employee attrition, then you may be interested in the blog-post on "Job-Hop and Attrition"
Many of the cause and effects and the reasons that are mentioned here can be avoided and even taken care of as is explained in "Three(Multi)-Pronged Approach to Learning and Organisation Development
