The Top 10 Questions for Management if a Company is Experiencing High Employee Turnover

Originally Submitted on 11/10/2000.

Employee turnover is expensive. It costs every company in terms of training time, customer service and trust, morale of other employees, and a host of other, less tangible areas. Some employee turnover is inevitable, but if yours is on the increase, here are some issues to look at, and questions that management may need to ask itself.

1. Salary

Certainly cash counts. While most people seek new employment for reasons other than salary, this will not be the case if your company is notorious for under-payment. On the other hand, higher salaries are unlikely to retain employees if the answers to the remaining questions are negative.

2. Trust

Do your employees feel trusted? Do they feel that they can trust you? Are your decisions based on careful reason and research, or on sudden reactivity to isolated incidents? Do you complain to one employee about the others behind their backs? If you do this frequently, they will eventually conclude that you probably talk about them behind their backs also. Do you keep employees informed of possible future changes? Do you stand by your word and walk the talk of your corporate mission statement? There are many ways to lose trust, and, once lost, recovery is slow and difficult.

3. Empowerment

Do your employees feel that they have some level of autonomy as to how they do their jobs, or are they micromanaged and second-guessed at every turn? Are their suggestions encouraged and seriously considered?

4. Supportiveness

However 'strong' you may expect your employees to be, everyone has down times when they need a bit of extra support. Is that available, or are they made to feel that they have to leave their problems at the door? Does management encourage colleagues to rally round in emergency, or turn a blind, possibly rather irritated eye to an employee with problems?

5. Future career path

Can your employees look forward to increasing levels of responsibility, challenge, income and status if these are deserved? How long does the average employee work in the same position without any chances for promotion? (Just adding extra work of the same kind does not count.)

6. Challenge

Keeping the level of challenge just right for employees is itself a challenge, but it is important. Too much, and they will feel unable to cope. Too little, and they will become bored. As in the previous item, just adding extra work is not an appropriate way to add challenge.

7. Time off attitude

If an employee has to take time off for illness or emergency family responsibilities, is this subtracted from their vacation time or taken as time without pay? Do employees feel that they must work even when sick, thus potentially infecting others, because they cannot
afford to take time off?

8. Benefits

How heavily do your employees' health benefits cut into their salaries? Can employees count on a stable level of benefits or do these change, and their contributions increase, on a regular or seemingly random basis? Do their benefits include subsidies for their further education and career development?

9. Valued

Do you employees feel valued? Not just in the 'rah-rah' company meetings, but in their day-to-day tasks and encounters? Are they treated as cogs-in-a-wheel or as people? Do they know why they do what they do? Why you make the decisions that affect them? Are their opinions and ideas taken seriously, sometimes acted upon?

10. Other employers

On all of the above, how does your company compare with other local employers? However much you choose to think this is irrelevant, it is not. Where employees are concerned, other local employers are your competition. How you compare with them needs to be considered just as carefully as how you compare with your sales competitors.

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