LACK OF career progression is the main reason people decide to change jobs, followed by a lack of new challenges, dissatisfaction with pay levels and not enough training or development opportunities
LACK OF career progression is the main reason people decide to change jobs, followed by a lack of new challenges, dissatisfaction with pay levels and not enough training or development opportunities.
A recent survey of 612 job candidates identified the top ten reasons why staff leave, and found that a key to retention is giving staff room to grow and develop their careers within the business.
“In a candidate-tight market, retention is more important than ever,” said Jacky Carter, director of Hays, which conducted the survey.
“By identifying the common reasons people decide to look for a new job, businesses could focus on preventative strategies to work towards keeping their existing talent.”
Other reasons employees moved on from their jobs included too much stress, excess travel time to and from work, office politics and the opportunity to seek work elsewhere in a specialised field.
“Poor management was also a key reason for leaving a current job, with lack of direction, little empowerment or lack of recognition from management common complaints,” said Carter.
Lisa Halloran, director of Retention Partners, agreed that lack of career growth in areas such as learning, variety and promotion often drove employees to seek employment elsewhere.
She said some factors, however, are very specific to certain employee groups only. “For example, employees in their 30s will quit for lack of career growth (career progression in their case) more so than for other reasons,” she said.
“The same is not true for employees in their early 20s who will quit for lack of learning, lack of variety, poor team environment, remuneration issues and lack of manager support.”
Halloran also noted that a manager’s common refrain when faced with a resignation is that it is the fault of the HR department.
“Assuming the recruitment process works to attract the target labour pool and that appropriate hiring checks and balances are in place, it can’t always be HR’s fault that some business units experience high turnover,” she said.
“The easy way out has been to lay the problem at HR’s door, and the recruitment industry has benefited from the manager’s sense of ‘all care, no responsibility’.”
She said organisations are reluctant to make retention a manager’s responsibility, and simply having best practice recruitment processes cannot overcome an employment experience which fails to deliver to expectations.
“The more sophisticated organisations are implementing change by increasing their managers’ capability to retain people and by linking managers’ retention rates to rewards and metrics designed to achieve desired outcomes,” Halloran said.
Companies are starting to understand that recruiting good people into a business is just the start of effective resourcing, she noted. “Companies are acknowledging that if they align expectations with reality, and understand how people regard the employment experience, then they’re more likely to have a satisfied employee for a longer period.”
Another trend Halloran noted is gathering momentum amongst more advanced companies is the work they are doing with near-retirees.
“The lack of candidates now is a sign on the future. Organisations are starting to identify the needs and expectations of their near-retirees in order to encourage them to delay retirement or to understand how to attract other retirees back to work,” she said.
If a company does attract a retiree back to work in some way and they subsequently leave, Halloran said it is unlikely they’ll be quitting because they don’t feature in the 10-year succession plan.
“The employment market is too fractured now to regard all employees in the same way. Understanding the key retention and attrition issues for key groups of staff is more valuable than a generic list.”
