Employee Retention: 2 Reasons Employees Quit Their Jobs and How Companies Can Combat Them

Satisfying Your Staff | Rachel Bishop

One of the biggest challenges for any company is the hiring process. Companies will go through and vet numerous resumes, host multiple rounds of interviews, and carefully select the right candidate to fill the position. The hiring process can easily take weeks or even months. For this reason, it is incredibly important for companies to retain their employees. In order to do this, they must assess the various reasons employees quit their jobs. Here are two major reasons employees quit their jobs and how to combat them:

Lack of Growth Opportunities

Ensure that your company is structured for internal career development. Employees should be given mentoring and high-quality feedback. These things do not have to be formal sessions. For example, if you want your employee to create a presentation on a marketing plan for your new product, mentor them by providing a detailed description of what is desired and give them concrete examples of past presentations. Following the presentation, pull your employee aside and tell them what was done well and what you thought they could have done better.

“Employees should be recognized for their hard work.”

Also, assess the current process of internal promotion at your company. Employees should be recognized for their hard work. Consider promoting employees internally instead of hiring from the outside to fill management positions. Current employees will already have a greater understanding of the company’s goals and values, as well as how different processes work. On the other hand, hard-working employees might feel underappreciated If an outsider earned the position they were working hard to move up to, and as a result, might feel more inclined to quit and find a higher-ranking position elsewhere.

Underutilization of Skill Set

Employees experience a greater sense of fulfillment when they are being applied to their fullest potential. They, therefore, might feel bored completing the same mundane tasks and may want a different job solely because they want to experience something new. A way to combat that is giving your employees different and more challenging tasks to complete. However, it is important to be realistic about their workload; simply adding more responsibilities to their regular, fully-utilized eight-hour workday and expecting everything to be completed is unrealistic. It is important to be clear about what current and expected job requirements are in order to avoid burnout.

“It is important to be clear about what current and expected job requirements are in order to avoid burnout.”

It might also be useful to provide employees with educational and job training programs. Connecting them with career resource centers and advertise related conferences and seminars (perhaps even going as a team!).