Top 3 Avoidable Management Mistakes That Cause Good Employees to Quit
If you’ve been in the workforce long enough, you know that it’s pretty tough to hold on to employees, especially good employees. So the real question is, why is it so hard to keep good employees? Because it shouldn’t be. Now, the answer to that question is quite simple: the reason why good employees quit is because of poor management and the mistakes they make.
The sad part about it is that the mistakes managers make are completely avoidable. As a manager, you take the time out to carefully select candidates that will not only represent the company in the best light but you also select candidates that will represent what you want your customer experience to be like, and this is one of the biggest must-haves in the service industry. But even with an impeccable employee management system, if the managers have poor management skills, your best employees will be the first to go.
Watch Out For Disengagement and “Brownout”
It’s a known fact that if you can’t keep your best employees engaged, you’re not going to be able to keep them. Keeping your employees engaged is something that you’d think would be common sense but you know what they say… “common sense ain’t so common!” When a company loses good employees, don’t think that they’re all going to disengage at the same time… your star employees will slowly disengage, losing interest in their current positions.
This phenomenon of lost interest does have an actual term… can you guess what it is? It’s not burnout either. When an employee loses interest in their job, what that employee is experiencing is “brownout.” So now your question is, what is brownout and what’s the difference between burnout and brownout?
Well, according to the Mayo Clinic, burnout is work-related stress that can cause extreme physical and emotional exhaustion… it can actually cause a person to lose their sense of self. Brownout differs from burnout in the aspect that people experiencing brownout aren’t going through extreme work-related stress. Brownout is a slow dissipation of job interest.
People who suffer from brownout never show any signs or symptoms of brownout either. In fact, you would never know someone is going through brownout because they still perform well at work; attending meetings, putting in lots of overtime hours, etc but they’re going through this pain in silence… from brownout, disengagement is born.
The next thing you know, that employee has turned in their two weeks notice or resignation. From a management point of view, it came out of nowhere and they have no idea what went wrong.
The Employee’s Point of View
In order for companies to have better retention of good employees, management needs to find out what they’re doing that’s causing good employees to not want to stick around for the long haul. Take a look at the biggest, and sometimes avoidable, mistakes management makes that cost them great employees.
Managers don’t show appreciation to their employees
Did you know that lots of employees leave their jobs because they don’t feel appreciated by their manager or that their work even matters to them? It happens all the time. People go to work for different reasons… some work because they want to climb that corporate ladder while others go to work help make ends meet to support their families but regardless of their motivation, the one thing that all employees want to feel is appreciated. Something as simple as handing out gifts with your company logo on it goes a long way with showing appreciation to employees.
Managers overwork their employees
There will come a point in every business where overtime hours will either be needed or required but when the need for overtime turns into a permanent thing, employees will soon grow tired of it and start looking for other job opportunities. The thing that lots of managers fail to realize is that when employee workweeks exceed 50 hours, the productivity not only declines but the quality of work also declines, making the overtime not even worth paying if the job is only going to be half-done.
Managers don’t have effective communication skills
Poor communication is one of the biggest traits of bad managers and it can cause a big rift in employee-manager relationships. Things like low morale, poor performance, and errors are all things that can make a good employee leave a company. When an employee has a manager with good communication skills, they never have to try and figure out what’s going on or where they stand in their performance.