4 common causes of a high employee turnover rate, and how to fix them

Having a high employee turnover rate is damaging for a business' culture as well as its profitability.

The problem with high employee turnover rates

Having a high employee turnover can seriously damage your business. You will spend time and money training people, only to have them leave shortly after. Now you must create new vacancy ads, go through a recruitment process, and integrate them into their new team. This is a process that is costly both in terms of time and money, and can ­harm your company culture (someone is just going to leave again anyway, right?). In this blog, we will identify 4 common reasons why companies experience high employee turnover rates, and how to address them.

Employees are not engaged

The challenge: Employees who are engaged are motivated to take on challenging tasks, support their colleagues and seek out opportunities for professional development. However, when employees are not engaged, it is easy for other businesses to make alluring offers and whisk your employees away. While some sources suggest that a lack of employee engagement has become a widespread cause for concern in today’s business landscape, there are certainly ways to combat this challenge

The solution: Companies can improve employee engagement by rewarding hard work, sharing results and addressing talent gaps. Through using a solution like business intelligence, it is easy to identify top performing staff, present relevant business results in an easy-to-understand manner, and identify staff that may be struggling.

Employees feel like they are not being treated fairly

The challenge: Another common reason employees leave a business is because they feel they are not being treated fairly. Perhaps they see their manager favor another employee, or they feel they are not recognized for the hard work they do. Now this could be true, or it could be a misunderstanding. Either way, an employee who feels their workplace is unfair will be motivated to seek out another employer who will treat them with more respect.

The solution: First, establish whether you may indeed have treated employees differently. You may have been doing so without realizing, or you may have been doing so because you felt like one employee was better equipped to handle certain tasks than another. Use a business intelligence solution to dive into the facts, and share your results with employees as transparency will improve how your employees perceive you. Perhaps you see one sales rep is struggling to close their deals, and feels you have assigned them the more challenging prospects. Ensure your deals are spread evenly between reps, or upskill the relevant rep so they feel more successful.

Employees don’t think you pay them enough

The challenge: No matter how good your company culture is in other aspects; a poor salary can make employees go elsewhere. This has to do both with our need for money to live, but also with how much an employee feels his or her work is valued. If an employee feels more valued elsewhere (and can get a bump in salary)­­­­, they are likely to make the switch.

The solution: First, do some research on what an average salary is for each role in your region, and make sure what you pay is not too far away from that average. However, giving everyone a raise might not be possible. Using business intelligence to monitor performance can help you reward top performers within your business. Or perhaps you can promote a little healthy competition and reward improvement? This may help engage employees who don’t feel like they can compete with your top employees.

Employees are overworked

The challenge: Many businesses seek to save costs by making sure there are no more employees than there is work. While this is an entirely valid strategy, businesses must be careful not to overwork their employees. When employees feel under constant pressure to get through a never-ending mountain of work by near-impossible deadlines, it can lead to feelings of stress and burn out. This can seriously impact their performance at work, as well as their ability to enjoy time outside of work. For this reason, employees who are overworked will want to find other opportunities that promote a healthy work/life balance.

The solution: Not every business can afford to make new hires. The good thing is, you don’t need to. Through making existing processes more efficient, you eliminate the need for more staff, and let technology do the hard work in a fraction of the time. Using Phocas allows businesses to quickly analyze their business data to make more informed decisions. Phocas users can easily identify new sales opportunities, optimize stock levels, improve profitability and more.

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