When an employee hands in their notice, are you certain that you’ve done everything you can to keep them?

If objectively you can be, then, subjectively, you can support the employee’s choice and wish them well on their next steps in their career.

But if you can’t objectively say this, then by building an understanding of why employees leave your organisation, you can harness this knowledge to effect change and increase employee retention.

Working systemically, allows you to view employee retention in-the-round, and illuminate the numerous intersecting aspects that create an organisational picture of why staff choose to leave or stay.

By the time staff hand in their notice, it’s often too late to turn things around for that individual, though there are some areas of influence that remain and you should grasp, if you can. Employee value cannot be taken for granted. The cost to recruit and train a new employee is significant. Costs include advertising, recruitment fees, time spent looking for candidates, interview costs, training and onboarding.

What’s more, the hidden costs of staff leaving can’t be underestimated:

Reduced productivity
Increased costs and time spent recruiting, training, and onboarding new employees
Decreased team morale and ability to perform effectively
Onlooker and contagion syndrome
Impact to wellbeing, engagement and motivation
Increased and uneven work loads to pick up the slack
Skills depletion and formation of gaps
Decreased ability to meet organisational strategic aims
General impact to the psychological contract (perceived job security, career prospects, fairness of pay and benefits, willingness to develop staff and meet their needs, and manager support).

Everyone has access to a continuum of personal power, including: choice, ability to change, neuroplasticity and to self-actualise, meaning that unless something has gone seriously wrong, the majority of negative employee experiences can be turned around for the better if all parties are willing.

By taking a holistic and systemic view, and building accountability and responsibility, an organisation of any size can begin to work towards down-turning problematic employee turn-over and building meaningful retention and people strategies.

8 steps to turning around problematic employee retention are:

Get leadership eyes on existing and emerging situations: ensure you are regularly apprised of retention, staff satisfaction and trends in staff leaver data.
Establish an evidence-based understanding of why staff have left in the past and what they say about working for you currently.
Go direct to staff teams and build your relationship with your employee communities, listen to what they have to say; build trust and model 100% listening.
Manage expectations - be clear that you can’t promise you’ll do something with everything you hear, but you can promise to listen to everything that everyone has to say and consider it.
Embark on fact-finding and empathy missions to really understand challenges from diverse employee perspectives.
Make what changes you can that are quick-wins.
Collect 360° feedback about leadership and management where possible. Identify ‘hot spots’ and develop targeted turn-around and improvement plans.
Take a systemic approach to improvement of systems and practices, and invest in people and wellbeing strategies that intersect with operational plans across the business.