An Employee Just Quits and Why You Didn’t See It Coming
It’s Friday afternoon and one of your employees asks for a private meeting. Before you even close the door, she tells you she’s found another job and is leaving the company.
You thought you had a good relationship with this employee. As far as you’re concerned, you were a decent boss. You treated the employee fairly, were supportive of his work, addressed him respectfully, and said “please” and “thank you.” You may even have gone out of your way to provide this employee meaningful development opportunities or a bigger salary.
Unfortunately, all of this is not enough. Like Alex from Groove said on an article:
Not everyone is committed to your company for life, and that’s okay.
4 Reasons why you didn’t see it coming
You don’t respect their time.
A really good CEO thinks about the bigger picture and realizes people have lives outside of work. That’s the number one way to prevent people from feeling like they might want to be somewhere else. But it’s easier than you think to be thoughtless. People feel like they have to stay until 6 to be a good co-worker, then they get a slow jump on traffic, they get home later and they’re tired when they really want to just go do their own thing. Or Monday mornings meetings. No one wants a staff meeting on Monday at 8 am. No one.
They don’t leave because of the job, they leave because of the manager.
Gallup found that, of the 7,200 of adults they surveyed, a whopping 50% have left a job “to get away from their manager.”
There are countless reasons an employee would have trouble getting along with their boss. Maybe they don’t feel comfortable bringing up questions and issues. Or perhaps they don’t feel like their boss is an advocate of theirs. Whatever the reason, the key takeaway is that there’s a correlation between an employee’s comfort level with their boss and how engaged they are at work. Some 54% of U.S. workers reported they felt most comfortable approaching their managers with “any type of question”.
The job wasn’t what they’d expected.
A little over 40% of all American workers quit within the first six months of starting a new job. In the business services industry specifically, that number is even higher at 51.39%. The main reason? Employees simply didn’t realize what the job would actually be like. At the end of the day, many job turnovers start with some kind of “post-hire shock,” as Leigh Branham calls it in her book The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave: How to Recognize the Subtle Signs and Act Before It’s Too Late.
They didn’t get enough coaching or feedback.
It should come as no surprise that your employees want to know how they’re doing — and they want to know it often. What are their strengths? Where can they improve? What do they need to do to eventually move up in your organization? Companies that implement regular employee feedback have 14.9% lower turnover rates than companies that don’t.
Giving feedback at performance reviews every six months to a year isn’t enough. Branham compares that to a basketball coach telling his players at the beginning of the season that he’ll evaluate their performance after they play 30 games.
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