Recruiting and retaining key talent is a challenge for most employers in the competitive economy. When employers fail to retain their best employees, the competition will be pleased to offer them a job role in their company.
Companies realize that key employees are expensive, as they are high productive performers, with above-average skills, competencies and capabilities that lead them to become role models and set an example for their colleagues.
However, not all companies are able to ensure retention of their human capital assets owing to reasons such as limited costs, bad management and lack of employee encouragement strategies.
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Before one of your star employees decides to quit and hands over the resignation letter, there are some tell-tale signs that an employer should be on watch out. By use of some change in behaviour detectors and slack attitude or motivation towards the job, employers should be able to take immediate actions such as these valuable reconsider their decision to quit.
The most simplest way to detect if a key employee wants to quit is to know if they are unhappy at work. There are some specific attitudes and reasons that possibly lead the star employees to quit:
Jealousy Towards Coworkers. Jealousy is a sign that someone is unhappy with an unfair decision. When a key talent is not chosen for a promotion and pay hike, for instance, he will react jealousy and disappointment. If the employer cannot offer a precise solution, star employees would be forced to rethink if their efforts are useless and they will soon start looking for employers who appreciate their hard work.
Excessive Use of PTO. If an employee wants to quit, she will maximise benefitting from the rights of having a Personal Time Off (PTO) from work. Be curious, if your star employees want to sign for long periods of PTO, as it can be quite possible that they want to use it as their last PTOs at work.
Poor Attitude. Star employees usually project initiation of ideas and showcase interests towards a project or job role. However, when they feel unhappy or dissatisfied, they tend to act disengaged, bored or disinterested. Such poor attitudes are warnings that they might not want to continue their career with the current company.
These signals are just possibilities, it is important for employers to be aware of what exactly is going on in the minds of their employees, their state of emotional and physical well being through an intensive communication with them.
Here are three key strategic approaches, HR managers could take to prevent key employees from quitting job:
‘Stay” interview is a one-to-one discussion between an employer and an employee to reveal some issues that lead to disappointment and discontentment in a job role, that makes look beyond for another suitable opportunity.
The key employee is expected to share their problems, worries and concerns related to their professional work, that is extremely demotivating to make them lose interest in their work life.
Also employers equally should be good listeners to accept feedback, criticism and inputs from the key employees, that they particularly dislike working with a company. It is important to always remember that employees do not leave companies, many at times they leave their managers.
Employers should be able to offer the best possible solution to retain key talent, sometime use mediation and problem-solving strategies to resolve conflicts with coworkers and so on.
Benefits usually work to a large extent to make a key employee rethink on their decisions to quit. If the company isn’t willing to offer higher pay raise, performance bonuses, yearly compensation, profit sharing and simple incentives are worth consideration. Also, flexible working hours, extra time off and business trips are beneficial to make key employees stay with the company.
Friendship is powerful. Supportive colleagues create better work environment that boost employee morale and entrust with a sense of ownership towards the company. A solid teamwork bonds the workforce to work optimally in an environment and coexist in a workplace setting without conflicts.
If required, employers can ask help from colleagues of their star employees or, even supervisor and managers to support and persuade him to stay with the company. This approach might seem old-school, but tapping the invisible bonding networks indirectly usually works in favour of the employer to make the employee reconsider their decisions before putting down papers officially.
However, always tread a cautious approach to talent retention as only when an employee feels highly engaged in the workings of a company to align professional career development goals with the company vision, they choose to stay and grow.
Next read: Welcome Back: Benefits of Rehiring Former Employees
