The issue of employee turnover, which is the nightmare of hundreds of thousands of managers around the world, is now on the agenda of senior management teams. Changing moods with the pandemic, care responsibilities of employees, working in quarantine, then hybrid working, the “Great Resignation” wave that swept the world and many more…
Employees have never been more eager to leave.
It says in a recent article that employee turnover will continue to rise as hybrid and remote work become the norm. In the article, it is emphasized that the social and emotional bonds of both hybrid and remote workers with their workplaces are weakening and this will increase the employee turnover rate. It is also among the lines that the concept of Great Resignation will change and turn into “Permanent Resignation”.
What are the costs of employee turnover?
With employee turnover, we look at the number of employees leaving an organization during a given period, and the rate at which employees leave the company and are replaced by new employees. According to Gallup, replacing a single employee costs two to two and a half times the employee’s annual salary. The primary reason for this loss is that staff turnover is a job killer. It slows productivity and hurts financially because of the high costs of recruiting.
But beyond the financial consequences of high turnover, there are other costs that are often overlooked.
High employee turnover is actually a company-wide pandemic. It demoralizes people, damages relationships, and more importantly, becomes contagious. Imagine that the 5 most talented people in the company quit within 1 month. With the loss of these people, the remaining employees begin to question consciously or not whether there is a problem and whether they themselves need a backup plan, It is usually inevitable that this questioning will occur in team chats and turn into browsing job ads. The task of the management teams here is to ensure that the employees who are left behind are informed and feel safe before this chain of action begins by acting with transparent communication rules.
Also, high turnover often increases the workload of remaining employees. Besides the word-of-mouth job dropout news, one of the reasons why the tendency to leave work increases may be due to the stress caused by overwork.
Undoubtedly, one of the most worrying aspects of talented employee turnover is the customers. Eliminating customer concerns, taking the necessary measures to prevent disruption of business and preventing customer loss are also on the list of things to be done simultaneously. Not primarily, concurrently.
New normal, new employee turnover rate
You should reconsider your employee turnover strategy, which you may have found solutions and slowed down when face-to-face working was the norm a few years ago, in the context of remote and hybrid working. Management teams all over the world are struggling with this, and if you’re dealing with unusual situations, rest assured you’re not alone. But here you are: Every company has its own dynamics, culture, and realities. You should build the most appropriate strategies for yourself in accordance with your own employee movements, and act in accordance with your own realities, not in accordance with common practices.
Gallup shows that low employee engagement rates result in 18 percent to 43 percent higher employee turnover rates, compared to high employee engagement rates. According to Gallup experts, the only way for almost every company to reduce employee turnover is to increase employee engagement.
It’s worth taking a look at the following information about employee turnover:
– The average employee turnover rate for companies is between 18% and 20%. (workinstitute.com)
– Retail and hospitality industries typically have the highest turnover.
– The sentence “employees leave their managers, not their jobs” has not lost its validity. In other words, when a high turnover rate occurs, managerial attitudes should be examined first. However, when the reasons for the “great resignation” that has occurred in the last two years are examined; factors exceeding managers such as low wages, lack of promotion opportunities, and inadequacy of the learning environment also stand out. (Pew Research Center)
– With the impact of the pandemic period, 48 percent of employees say that childcare-related problems are one of the reasons for them to quit their jobs. (Pew Research Center)
– Exit interviews are a very important resource to take a company picture. Ideally, those interviews should become a natural part of communication under a different heading before resignation.