3 Indications Your Employee is Getting Ready to Walk
Everyone knows how disruptive it can be to lose an employee, especially unexpectedly. Add in the fact that the typical cost of employee turnover is estimated at 3x the departing employee’s salary, and you’ve got some serious reasons to implement some mitigating steps to up employee retention. Step one in proactively engaging employee retention is walking the proverbial factory floor to identify those telltale signs an employee is getting ready to give their two weeks notice. From our conversations with HR pros, here are three harbingers of employee turnover, and some best practices to bolstering company retention.
1. Erosion in communication. Just like in a marriage, when a working relationship becomes dominated by silence and staccatoed “get away from me as soon as possible” conversations, it’s usually an indication that an employee is losing interest. Employees want to know that they are doing well at their job, and the primary place that they get that affirmation is in conversations with company leadership. When they don’t care to engage, it can often mean they don’t care to receive that coveted affirmation. In short, they don’t care about the company story, and see themselves less and less a part of it.
Apply this without any baseline and you run the risk of thinking all of your introverts are on their way out! Knowing your employees and getting a baseline in how they communicate will help you identify those seismic shifts in their typical communication baseline, allowing you to intervene early-on before unnamed problems fester into insurmountable issues.
A key practice that will allow you to calibrate your baseline is routine counseling. Be it formal or informal, a company counseling program is one of the best retention tools an organization can implement. It makes employees feel valued, develops junior leaders, and creates a culture that preserves the dignity of your workforce by engaging employees on a human level. Leadership that fosters such human interactions in their organization will proactively avoid the plight of treating employees like cogs in a machine.
And, it affords leaders the opportunity to tell the company story, and let employees see their place in the dramatic saga of your organization’s success.
2. Steady Decrease in Performance. Either paralleling or shortly following erosion in communication, a consistent decline in performance is another harbinger of employee turnover.
As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, “man always moves toward that which he perceives to bring about his greatest good.” If we can agree this is the case, then it’s the job of leaders and human resource professionals to demonstrate how dedication to the company mission is part of each employee’s movement toward greatness! We must tell the story, and make clear where they are a part of it.
When an employee begins to see their road to greatness branching outside of your organization, their diligence and concentration begins to follow in suit. Without a doubt, a declining employee performance is a primary indicator that an employee no longer sees their path to greatness aligned with your company mission. Chances are, they’ve already begun researching their opportunities.
In order to detect these shifts in employee performance as early as possible, as in the communication harbinger above, you need to establish a baseline. Here, performance evaluations are an invaluable tool. Not only do they allow employers to keep a quantitative gauge on performance, but they serve as a primary means of weaving an employee’s contribution to the greater story of organizational success. The best performance reviews are those that have a balanced evaluation of qualitative and quantitative results: a mix of “good vibrations” and “show me the money!”
Related Blog: 3 Best Practices For Effective Employee Performance Reviews
Not sure how to get a performance review process started or don’t have the time? This is a great place for HR consulting firms to step in and help you build out the clear job descriptions, evaluation criteria, and business processes that are the key framework of an effective performance review process.
3. They’re Millennials, and they’ve hit their six-month and 2 year anniversaries. While the average timespan Millennials will hold a job before transferring is 1-2 years (Millennials will change jobs and estimated 15 times in their working career), some studies report that the typical Millennial is considering a new job after the first 6 months. Furthermore, per Rutgers University’s 2012 Talent Report, this up and coming generation places a higher value than previous generations on “knowing that their job makes a difference.”
Considering the stats, this is an opportunity for employers to institute some proactive measures to retain Millennials, who will soon ascend to the largest demographic group of the global workforce.
One recommendation for Millennial retention is shortening feedback cycles for employees in their first 2 years. After onboarding, it is easy for a new employee to get lost. Increasing feedback frequency through quarterly counseling sessions and bi-annual performance reviews in the first 2 years is one way of building opportunities to remind employees of their valuable place in the company’s mission. Sure, money is the universal language that appeals to every generation, but Millennials, more so than their predecessors, want to know they are an intricate player in their organization’s mission to impact the world around them for the better.
In short, those pesky harbingers of employee turnover are out there and easy to spot for those employers and HR professionals that make it a point to be vigilant. Equally present are the opportunities to engage with employees who are teetering on the brink of flying the coop for greener pastures. Building the feedback processes to tell the stories of both the employee and the company is an invaluable practice in retaining talent and helping employees write their own story of greatness.
Finally, there is always going to be turnover. But, while employers’ and employees’ vision of greatness does not always align, in the moments where such alignment can be nurtured through great leadership, a company ceases to be just a company—it becomes a tale of greatness, and that’s worth sticking with!
