Reasons for employee turnover and how to eliminate them

Employee turnover negatively impacts the organization by increasing hiring costs, consuming recruiters’ time, and discouraging other employees. The company’s losses due to employee turnover are huge. According to SHRM, the average cost of a resigned employee is about one-third of their annual earnings. Additional expenses account for soft costs (67%), such as reduced productivity, interview time, lost knowledge, and hard costs (33%), including recruiting, background checks, and temporary employees.

If you’ve spotted the growing employee turnover rates, it’s time to think about your HR strategy and figure out why people leave. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the causes of employee turnover and the ways to prevent them.

Work Institute annually explores employee turnover tendencies and actions organizations can opt for to increase employee retention. While 2020 statistics can have variables brought by COVID-19, some figures from 2019 are still quite eloquent. The Work Institute identified 52 different reasons behind people quitting their jobs. Split into categories, major causes of employee turnover look as follows: 

Along with lack of career development, work-life balance, and manager behavior as the top categories, there are other essential reasons. They include wrong hiring strategy, toxic culture, lack of attachment to the company values and goals, and employee burnout, partly caused by the new reality coming along with the pandemic. Let’s focus on the substance of each of these reasons and explore how to prevent high employee turnover rates.

Hiring quality talents requires a solid recruiting strategy and time, and it’s totally worth it. A wrong hire gets seriously expensive, and besides increasing the employee turnover rate, it may cost the company from $240K to $850K per employee. The recruiting error may lead to the workplace’s tainting and even damaging of a company reputation.
 

Behind the poor hiring decisions, there are typically impulsive hires, overlooking the red flags, and desire to close the opening asap. Along with that, hiring managers and recruiters may not have enough information about critical requirements and the entire vision of the kind of person to fill the position.  

This is one of the key high turnover rate causes. Employees naturally look for career growth. This aspiration means not solely financial growth but mostly professional development. Hence, if you don’t offer your employees’ career development vectors, most likely, you’ll see them leave in a while. 

Along with career growth, people want their work to have a purpose, and ideally, to see how their particular input brings changes for the better of the entire organization. Unfortunately, it happens that C-suite and employees exist in parallel realities. Often, due to a lack of understanding of the attachment role and poor communication within a company, people start feeling like their work has no meaning and thus look for other job opportunities elsewhere, contributing to volunteer employee turnover. 

Toxic culture is one of the reasons that can literally skyrocket employee turnover. When people feel constantly stressed out, ignored, afraid to make a minor mistake, or experience bullying at work, most likely, they will lose motivation and won’t see themselves staying with their current employer.

The last but not least aspect causing employee turnover is burnout, which gets increasingly crucial along with the pandemic. Some employees shift to working remotely and literally “live at work”. Others feel as if they don’t have enough working hours to cope with their jobs. The employees, overloaded with work, start feeling stressed and burned out, and that may push them to quit and look for the workplace offering them better work-life balance.