After all your efforts in recruiting and training the right employees, you will want to retain them as well. However, what if your employee turnover is quite high? Do you know why you are not able to keep your top talent? Here are 5 reasons you might not retain your top performers:
You don´t provide flexibility
Flexibility in working hours and place and work-life balance are factors that are becoming more and more important to the current workforce. In fact, the younger generation in the workplace probably won´t even consider working for you if you don´t provide some sort of flexible hours or remote working options. Flexibility is often considered more important than a bit more salary or other monetary rewards. If you don´t provide flexibility, you will not only have issues attracting top talent but it will also be a challenge to keep your top talent.
You have a toxic working culture
Considering the amount of hours one spends at work, the atmosphere should be somewhat pleasant. Therefore, you should have a good working culture in order to retain your top talent. Nobody wants to work with complainers, free riders or bad team players. And a few toxic employees, unfortunately, impact the whole working culture quite quickly. Therefore, at the first signs of toxic employees or a negative working atmosphere, you have to immediately take action to take matters in your own hands and stop the negativity in order to not lose some of your top performers who will quickly get fed up with it.
You don´t provide (enough) development opportunities
Top employees want to keep developing themselves and never stop learning. Therefore, one of the reasons you might have difficulties retaining your top talent can be that you don´t provide enough development opportunities. Ensuring a lifelong learning culture with plenty of opportunities for training and development will not only help you retain your top talent but will also be an important factor in attracting new talent. Don´t limit yourself to formal classroom training but also think about MOOCs or an online platform with learning opportunities that you can offer to your employees.
You micromanage
Micromanagement is one of the biggest irritation factors for many employees and therefore the management style of your leaders can be an important reason your top talent is leaving. Leaders who micromanage basically say indirectly that they don´t trust their employees to do a good job and therefore prefer to be on top of every single detail. This is probably not the way your top talent wants to work. And to be frank, if they are your top talent, they shouldn´t work like that. Your working culture should be one of trust and accountability. If you have the right people, they will do a good job.
You don´t reward good performance
If someone does a good job, they need to be recognized for it. This does not mean that you need to increase salaries constantly but if a good employee doesn´t get recognized for their work, that will definitely impact morale. Hence, if you don´t reward good performance, your top talent might be leaving. Make sure you promote from within and reward a job well done to keep your top performers motivated and incentivize the whole workforce to do a good job.
In summary, if you want to retain your top talent, make sure you provide flexibility, don´t have a toxic working culture, offer the right development opportunities, don´t micromanage your employees and reward good performance.
What other reasons do you think causes your top talent to leave? We would love to read your ideas in the comments section!