3 reasons employees will leave your company after the recession
Today’s guest post is by Lance Haun, vice president of outreach for MeritBuilder, the main guy over at YourHRGuy.com and a member of the SmartBrief on Workforce Advisory Board. He’s been in the human resources space for almost seven years and (unfortunately) has experience with both sides of the recession.
When I first entered corporate HR, we were in a boom period. Do you remember that? I barely can. I remember hearing about the crisis of the coming labor shortage and how we would be on our knees begging and pleading for people nearing retirement to stay, convincing Gen Xers to stay with meaningless promotions and scooping up as many Gen Yers as we possibly could.
Those were the good old days. That is, if you were a person looking for work.
With unemployment pushing 10%, perhaps employers are taking a breather. They can worry less about people leaving and when they do, they aren’t sweating that, either. Now, instead of candidates asking for stock options, they are asking if the job is full time and offers health insurance. There is talent out there, and it is cheap.
After the recession ends though, some of your best talent may be walking out the door. They probably won’t tell you why either. Here are a couple of hints:
- You didn’t operate with integrity. That can be anything from giving your executives big bonuses while you cut pay for everyone else to offering a new employee 60% of your normal base because people are desperate. If a company operates honestly and suffers, people can hold their head up. Employees can smell busted integrity from a mile away though. When they can get away, they can.
- You lack real leadership. Scare tactics? Hiding? Spinmeister? Denial? If these words can be used to describe how your executive team operated during the recession, expect some big-time turnover. Employees look to management to inspire confidence and promote accountability but also to be upfront and honest. Management’s true colors can show during a recession, and employees will remember them.
- You didn’t do the easy things. When you were piling on the work, zeroing out bonus checks and raises, and expecting more productivity with less, did you say thank you more often? Did you recognize their accomplishments as more impressive with the limited resources? When they worked 20 hours over the weekend, did you allow them to take an afternoon off to watch a kid’s soccer game?
If you’re not hitting a home run in all three of these areas (or at least a solid double), how are you fixing it or what are you going to do to stem the tide of turnover when it hits?
Image credit, Martinan, via iStock
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Posted by Steve on September 28th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
We’ve found similar results indicating employers could face mass talent drains as the labor market begins to turn in a recent research we conducted with HCI. See: http://bit.ly/MTkit
The reason – employers are vastly overrating the morale of their employees as 84 percent of those surveyed indicated a belief that their workforce is content to simply to have a job while only 58 percent of workers feel that way
Posted by Gwyn on September 30th, 2009 at 1:32 am
Excellent points, particularly concerning failure to operate with integrity and neglecting non-monetary acknowledgment. I’ve been saying this for quite a few years now…many companies seem to have forgotten the fact that they owe their continued existence and whatever they may have accomplished to the efforts of *all* their employees, not just the top executives. Just because someone may hold a comparatively low-level position doesn’t automatically mean that this person isn’t making a contribution or that whatever contribution he or she makes is worthless merely because it might not be the most impressive. While it’s only natural for employers to be concerned about employee loyalty, I think one of the very first steps they should consider taking when looking for ways in which to improve this is…looking in a mirror. The business world operates on the principle of quid pro quo, and it’s said that every action has an equal and opposite reaction — so if a company is dissatisfied with the level of employee loyalty, perhaps one question which they ought to be asking themselves is whether they’ve been showing loyalty to their employees in ways (this is important) which are meaningful to them. A company in which most of the employees have reason to believe that they’re respected and treated fairly is more likely to flourish and be successful because morale will be higher and the employees will by and large have more motivation to give their best.
Posted by Nancy Bager on September 30th, 2009 at 9:08 am
Most companies forgot during this recession that employees are their most valuable resource. Once this bad economy ends employees will start leaving for better opportunities if the company they currently work for isn’t doing the right thing- e.g. poor pay, cut hours, no benefits, lack of appreciation, etc. These companies will then realize that they perhaps should have treated their employees better.
Posted by Derek Irvine, Globoforce on September 30th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Without your people you have nothing. They are truly your greatest competitive advantage. Yet survey after survey, article after article, shows the majority of employees are planning to jump ship as soon as they safely can – largely because of the way they have been treated during the recession. Note that employees often understand why company leadership had to reduce headcount, cut costs, freeze pay, and other actions. It’s the lack of respect and recognition for what the remaining employees were able to do that is behind this mass desire to “find someplace where I’m appreciated. http://globoforce.blogspot.com/search?q=competitive advantage
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