Could Some of Your Employees be Leaving in 2016?

You’re a small business owner and you’ve hired several employees.

You spend time training and pay them during the time they’re climbing their learning curve.

Finally, you have a group of employees that are functioning well, requiring less supervision, working efficiently. Then some quit and you’re stuck again, training and paying more people to learn to do the job.

What happened?

Employee retention is very important to maintaining a healthy work environment. Frequent employee turnover can be discouraging to other employees as well as unhealthy for the bottom line.

Bolste, a leading business operation system, recently commissioned YouGov PLC, a research and consulting firm, to study Americans job satisfaction. The results suggest that 26 percent are unhappy or indifferent about their jobs. Twenty-eight percent are thinking about moving on to another job.

Bolste claims that employee turnover costs American businesses over $11 billion a year.

Leif Hartwig, CEO of Bolste, says, “As the average American workweek tops 47 hours, it makes sense that Americans are increasingly mindful of the quality of their jobs and their happiness as this is where they spend a majority of their waking hours. Work-life balance, career fulfillment and sense of purpose are all important topics that employees are expecting employers to take seriously.

“For our 2016 Industry & Productivity Perspectives Report, we explored the attitudes of working American adults on their sentiments towards their current jobs, possible plans to change jobs as well as the quality of business communication available at their workplaces.”

Some of the things workers feel add to their burden at work:

• Lots of pointless meetings that don’t achieve anything.
• Cookie cutter type manuals for new employees.
• Leaving the new employees to figure out things on their own.
• Too many emails, leading to a waste of time sorting through the irrelevant ones.

A graph listing areas in which employees feel undervalued is shown below:

Ultimately, the how-to on employee retention in this study boils down to respecting them and their ideas. Value their time as much as your own by targeting specific meetings and e-mails to those that work in those areas covered. Take care with new employees that they feel up to speed and that they can freely ask questions.

Bolste is a company that assists small businesses with the management of their company, supplying the means for connecting co-workers, helping to share files, assign tasks, organize projects, group chat, and more.

Images: Bolste 2 Comments ▼

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