Monday, November 16, 2009

Why People Leave Their Jobs

People don't leave the work. They rarely leave the work. Contrary to what you might think or might even hear from the employee who chooses to leave ("this job sucks") it isn't the work that they're leaving most times. They leave the rest of the staff, the managers, the people and the culture - which is largely created by the people. Its almost always a people issue when people leave.

Only 12% of people who leave a job for another job leave for more money. (A survey of managers thought the number was 89%. Oops.) 88% of workers end up leaving because the job was less exciting than advertised, their manager turned out to be a jerk, there were personality conflicts or the culture didn't fit. Everyone of those reasons for leaving is "people" created.

So if you're trying to figure out why your attrition numbers are high and your retention numbers are low, it's because of your people - the rest of your people. They're creating a culture that doesn't work, which gets managers promoted that shouldn't be, which creates personality conflicts and turf-wars which means you have to over-promise your job excitement/reward levels to try to get people to come and work for you. That means that your fibbing will be found out, someone will leave, someone will have to pick up the slack in the short-term, some people will get angry and frustrated because the culture is lousy and they'll end up leaving too.

Are you catching on here yet? It's an Attitude thing. You need to fix it before you lose more people.
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Attitude w/ ATTITUDE

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