What Makes Staff Members So Keen To Leave?

July 29, 2010

RECRUITMENT should always be considered hand in glove with retention. Keeping good staff is just as important, in some ways more important, than finding good staff. That being said, it has to be remembered that hospitality has a high natural level of staff turnover. Businesses and services are often marked by seasonal, weekly or monthly variations in activity. The labour pool includes many people who aren’t looking for long term careers – students, travellers and others.

But that makes the managerial, supervisory and core staff – who provide the business with the quality, experience and continuity it needs – all the more important. So, how do you keep key staff? The simple answer is don’t lose them! That’s not meant to sound flippant. An important thing to learn is that money isn’t one of the most common reasons that people look for another job. They’re much more likely to go because they’re dissatisfied with some aspect or aspects of their current employment and that will very often be down to the way they are managed.

Let’s consider some of the most frequent reasons for leaving a job.

• “I’m not being looked after” Often this will concern working conditions. A proper staff room is considered very important by many people. The provision of decent uniforms (in the correct size) is another issue for some staff.
Put managers into a tiny cramped office and tell them to operate hardware and software without proper training or technical support and at least some of them will start looking at the job ads.

• “My expectations haven’t been realised” This is very common indeed. A job interview is an unusual thing; a candidate will be selling him or herself and, often, the job provider will be “selling” the job. A year down the line the
successful candidate will be asking if the reality has matched up to the sales pitch.

If you’ve said you’ll be joining a great team and that isn’t the case, there could be problems. If you say there will be plenty of opportunity to learn and you’ll work across several departments and then the person is put on breakfasts for the foreseeable future you can expect dissatisfaction.

So make sure everything you say about the job is reasonably accurate and it will pay to highlight any known or recurring difficulties or issues, when the very busy periods or indeed the normally quiet periods are for example,
how you handle shift rotations etc.

• “I’m not being recognised or rewarded or I need another challenge” This is usually a longer term issue. Someone may be a good employee but may have reached the top of their grade or bonus scale and be behind other
colleagues who are happy to stay put. The best way to prevent this is to have a system of personal development
plans and appraisals, designed to identify training needs and potential career paths. If such a system is in place then frequently the “lack of challenge” problem can be avoided.

However sometimes with all best efforts the situation still arises. In that case the best thing might indeed be that the employee finds the challenge elsewhere. If nothing else it will free his or her job up to give someone else a stimulating new challenge.

• “I’m overworked” Hospitality can feature long and often anti-social hours. But where that’s known from the start or where the employee understands that situation and knows what’s likely to happen in the future the actual number of hours isn’t always a problem. The feeling of overwork takes many forms.

An employee may feel he or she is doing very much more than colleagues of similar status, grade and remuneration. A manager might feel there’s just too much to do in the available time because the assistant that was promised has
never materialised.

Again here the secret is honesty and transparency.

• “I’m not paid enough” Many people might be surprised by how low this is in the league table of employee issues. Usually money has been agreed up front; so long as the expected salary finds its way into the bank or wage packet there’s little to complain about. Indeed it’s not entirely unknown for people to leave and go to somewhere paying less in order to get out of a place they dislike for other reasons.

On the other hand someone may be tapped or headhunted by a competitor or they may read an article which suggests to them the salary they agreed is in fact below market rate. Or they may argue that their experience and extra work knowledge now makes them more valuable to you. If that’s the case you will have to make a judgement. How valuable are they to you? Do you have someone waiting in the wings or would you be confident of recruiting an
able successor?

Remember if you see people leave and simply replace them without addressing the issues that caused them to leave you won’t make things better. At best you’ll be replacing “old stock”. So pay attention to details of working conditions, build a system of staff development and appraisals and stick to things that you agree in the appraisals. Be straightforward and honest. Look out for people doing too much work when colleagues may be doing too little. And if all else fails conduct an exit interview with the leaver, tell them you want to get better for the future and that knowing their reasons for leaving should help you with this.

This may all sound like a lot, but if it improves employee satisfaction and staff retention and cuts down on the costs and effort of constant recruitment it will be well worth it.

And you’ll probably end up with a better business for your customers too.