Mistakes that make your employees quit

What you need to know:

  • Patrick Ngolobe, a human resource manager, says many times employers make promises to their employees about salary increment, job promotion or even motivational tokens.

Good employees are irreplaceable. If you are an employer who wants your best employees to stay, you need to think carefully about how you treat them. You need to make them want to work for you.

Not honouring commitments

Patrick Ngolobe, a human resource manager, says many times employers make promises to their employees about salary increment, job promotion or even motivational tokens.

This usually places you on the fine line that lies between making them very happy and watching them walk out the door.

Many employers do not honour their promises of career growth. They instead promote new recruits, which demotivates hardworking employees who have been loyal to the company for several years.

When you work very hard only to get passed over for a promotion that is given to someone who glad-handed their way to the top, it is an insult that will make your good employee leave.

Have a career planning chat with new employees. Ask them to share their work goals.

“Talented employees are passionate and as an employer, it is your responsibility to provide opportunities for them to help them pursue their passions. This will help improve their productivity and job satisfaction,” he advises.

Some managers fear that productivity will decline if they let people expand their focus and pursue their passions. If you do not let your employees pursue their passions, they will not develop their skills. When you have a talented employee, it is important that you keep finding areas in which they can improve their skill. Good employees want feedback and it is your job to keep it coming. If you do not, your best people will grow bored and complacent,” Ngolobe warns.

Striking a balance: Samuel Baseka, a businessman, says you must know how to make a balance between being professional and being human. If an employee reports bad health, an employer should be in position to understand.

Baseka says: “Good bosses should be empathetic with employees that are going through hard times. If you fail to do this, you are likely to have a high rate of turn over. Sometimes the employers do not give proper communication and there is a lot of politics and this frustrates employees to leave your organisation.”

Non-recognition: Nothing hurts good employees like overworking them. They become perplexed and feel as if they are being punished for great performance. If you must increase how much work your talented employees are doing, it is better to increase their status as well.

Baseka thinks good employees will take on a bigger workload, but they will not stay if their job suffocates them in the process.

If you must increase your employee’s workload, it should correspond with pay raises, promotions, and title-changes. It may be a pay rise, vouchers, commission or public recognition.

“If you simply increase workload because people are talented, without changing a thing, they will seek another job that gives them what they deserve. Managers need to communicate with their people to find out what makes them feel good as a reward for the job well done,” Ngolobe says.

Baseka says having routine work schedules that make your employees feel bored because they have to execute the same duties over and over again can also lead to employee turnover. As an employer, it is important that you introduce non routine assignments and let every employee get involved.