Why staff leave organisations, it’s not money

Team development

Why are your best people leaving?

Research from the Saratoga Institute indicates of the top seven reasons money isn’t one of them.

  • Mismatch between person and job
  • Not enough training and feedback
  • Feeling undervalued or unrecognised
  • Loss of trust in leadership
  • Too few growth opportunities
  • Job or workplace not as expected
  • Stress from overwork

So what’s the answer? Learn how to select staff better by improving your interviewing skills, see our eBook How to Prepare and Conduct Staff Selection Interviews. Ensuring the right people are placed in the right jobs and understand their role and future in the organisation.
Improve your training by first understanding what training is required see our eBook How to Conduct a Training Needs Analysis.
By improving your training by providing training for the right things, your staff will be more empowered, included and understand where their future lies.

How to supervise staff

I believe the title manager is misleading those appointed to the role of manager; into believing their primary function is to manage or supervise staff/people under them. By extension, it is then interpreted to mean control. This stifles staff, inhibits innovation as well as lowering motivation. Once all staff are under control doing things according to your procedures; you are effectively are operating with just one brain, where as you could have been working with multiple brains.

Managers need to lose “I’ and ‘me’ and replace them with ‘we’ and ‘us’.
Managers need to lead staff rather than supervise staff. Good managers draw out the best from each and every staff member. It’s vital managers acknowledge staff contributions. Most importantly, managers need to make decisions arising from the multiple inputs from staff and dismiss those staff who don’t contribute. It’s tempting to think the title’ team leader’ would be better, but that title has been polluted by misuse by ‘managers’ who use the team leader title instead of a pay rise and confine the title to use in the lowest ranks only.

Leading a team should be a source of great pride and hard work. Paying attention to what each member can add to achieve the team’s goals, moving people into roles that suit their skills. Understanding what skills are needed by your staff is often the first step. Our Training Needs Analysis manual describes how to do this in detail.

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