Top Reasons People Quit and How To Prevent It!

If you’re a manager or run a business, hiring great talent is essential to your success.  Having a great employee is a godsend, and you want to make sure that you do everything in your power to keep them on board.  As such, here are the top reasons people quit and what you can do as a leader or business owner to prevent it!

Limited Career Advancement

One of the most common reasons people quit is because they feel like they can no longer advance their careers.  This feeling usually stems from two places: either the individual doesn’t have the skills to get to the next level, or the hierarchy of the company doesn’t have ways to advance.

For the first one, this has to do with feedback from a manager.  You need to ask yourself if anyone has ever spent time developing this person.  Can they build the skills needed, and do they even know what they are missing?  A little work and investment for success in this person can yield great results.

A great way to advance within a company’s hierarchy is to go back to school and earn an advanced degree that is related to the business. Online universities are able to make this goal very attainable. You can take classes anywhere with a laptop and Wi-Fi, and even schedule these classes to your liking. In essence, by simply cutting an hour or two of television out of your after-work routine and sticking to your schedule, you could end up with a great degree.

However, if the company doesn’t have advancement opportunities, this could pose a problem.  A good leader should look at why: is it too many people with tenure jamming up the pipeline?  Are there poor performers that aren’t being moved out?  Has growth slowed and positions are not being created?  Some of these issues can be dealt with by management, but other can’t easily be fixed.  As such, an open, honest dialogue can be valuable.

Unsatisfied with Pay and Benefits

Another common reason people quit is that they are unsatisfied with pay and benefits.  A common misconception is that all employees are disappointed with their pay.  This is generally not true.  In fact, while most people, when asked, will always want more, most people are satisfied with their pay and benefits.

The most common reason this comes up as an issue is because of fairness of pay, rather than the actual pay itself.  Usually, the employee either finds out others are more highly compensated, or another business is compensating employees higher.

As a leader, it is important to retain top talent, and keep them happy, especially when it comes to pay.  However, this is a tough one, and you can’t always make it work each time.  The best thing you can do is make sure that your pay continues to be competitive to what your competitors are offering their employees.

Lack of Fit to Job

Sometimes, there is a just a general lack of fit to the job.  Usually the employee discovers this first, but lackluster performance will soon get the manager’s attention as well.  If an employee doesn’t fit in their current job, you should really see if there is a better fit somewhere in the organization.  Remember, you did hire this person because you thought there was potential.  This is a tough one though, and sometimes it’s best to point the employee in a better direction.

Manager or General Work Environment

This one is way too common, but it is true – your boss makes or breaks whether you want to continue working at a company.  The manager has a huge role in keeping employee moral up, and he does it in unsuspecting ways – usually  just how he communicates, motivates, and recognizes individuals.  Failing in these aspects will lead to employees having poor moral.

Some specific common environmental complaints include:

• Poor or lack of communication
• No clear understanding of goals
• Disrespectful communication
• Favoritism
• Micro-management
• Workloads are too heavy
• Poor work-life balance culture

Most of these things are controllable by the direct superior, but some do reflect company cultures as well.  If you’re finding or suspecting that employees as a whole aren’t happy working in your organization, you need to start looking at their supervisors or managers, and possibly your company culture.  This one may require structural change to address.

Why else do employees quit?  What can you do to prevent it?