Posted by Aman Verma on Thursday, 12-22-2016 5:09 am

Employees leave a workplace due to two primary reasons – you fired them or they quit. Nonetheless, their painful absence is felt the very next day when you again have to grudgingly begin a hiring process to replace them.

In retrospective, if your business is turning up high employee turnover figures, the hiring process becomes really costly. Don’t you think something is going wrong somewhere? A research by CAP suggests that it costs around $3,000 to find a suitable candidate, hire them and train them for a job that generally pays $10-12 an hour. This suggests that you can make amends before things go wrong.

Why Does Employee Turnover Go Haywire For Some Businesses?

There are various reasons for this. First of all, thanks to an impersonal application process or consultancy, many candidates escape tests like pre-employment skill assessment, mental health assessment, and past behavior assessment. Additionally, many employees feel trapped inside their jobs when there is no appreciation – monetary or verbal.

More often, a haphazard employee onboarding program is also to blame. The employee isn’t even properly aligned with the company’s ethics and principles before he is pushed into his cubicle to crunch some numbers.

Lastly, rifts between the seniors and juniors are also a major concern. Employees not getting along with each other is a major reason why many good employees defect towards your competitors in order to escape prejudice and insubordination. It is a known fact that most employees quit bossy managers and not their job. This is unfair and unjust and needs to be tackled ASAP.

We have compiled a list of 10 major reasons why your employee turnover might go haywire if you do not act upon it now:

1. No Monetary Incentive or Recognition: Most employees work for money. If there is no increase in the pay scale, most employees will feel frustrated that they do all the hard work, but their superiors get the perks. To keep this in check, employees should be rewarded in R&R (rewards and recognition) programs to help them feel good, fairly compensated and noticed.
2. Overtime Hours: Yes, overtime hours do pay, but they are really taxing. Not only do they affect employees mentally, but also hamper their personal lives. Moreover, when employees are forced to work on weekends, they tend to snap. Overtime should be applied only in crunch situations and only good employees should be retained who align with your business’s ideals.
3. Millennials don’t like odd jobs: Most millennials are talented enough to even handle your job. However, since they are younger, they might sometimes get handed odd-jobs like updating software and stuff since they are generally tech-savvy. This comes off as rude and can make them complain about their job.
4. Employee Introduction: Very few businesses introduce new hires to the current staff. For them, the work begins on day one. This gives millennials a very small chance to learn from the boomers. Efforts should be made to conduct employee onboarding for formal introductions and mentorship programs in which boomers and senior employees can teach various tips and tricks to millennials before they retire.
5. Training Programs are Outdated: If training is haphazard, employee performance is bound to be sloppy. Moreover, if you have to explain the entire business process to each new hire while they are at the job, your training programs need a major overhaul because this training should be done before they join. Also, previous experience does not count when a new hire comes into a new industry.
6. Wrong Hires: Relying on consultancies and talent recruitment firms is not always reliable. You need to conduct thorough interviews with new candidates. Blindly believing in a candidate without putting them to test is wrong.
7. Boring Workplace Environment: Turn the workplace environment into a fun and productive place to work for. Incorporate cultural values into the mix and give newer opportunities and training to the employees.
8. Ignoring the Millennials: Promoting the wrong employee has the biggest repercussions in the form of deserving employees quitting the job. Most millennials feel deceived when their managers are promoted while they are not. Managers that have poor interpersonal skills will never be able to build teams that give faster output.
9. Quick-fire Errors: Firing employees is not always the solution; sometimes if the crime is not too big, the guilty employee can be let off with a warning. This can save you from incurring the cost on a new hire.
10. Minimal or Zero Employee Engagement: Employees are not horses working on a farm; they also have families to feed. Employee engagement programs help them to know about the ups and downs the workplace is facing and makes them plan their career path accordingly.

To sum up, voluntary or involuntary employee turnover hits your business hard. If you really need to fire someone, go ahead, but always consider your options before doing so. When an employee quits, apart from hiring someone new, also try to notice the interpersonal dynamics they had with their co-workers. Maybe the co-workers were the reason a good employee left you.

With the steps mentioned above, you can dig deeper into your hiring practices, appraisal methods and also fortify your business against high turnover rates and eventually retain the most integral part of your business – a talented employee.