More often than not, your employees don’t quit: they just don’t stay.

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Even if the great resignation is now history, talent retention remains a real problem for businesses, if only because the talent shortage continues to affect many sectors, and a talent that leaves is always a recruitment problem to come.

For a long time, it was often considered that those who resigned were those who abandoned others, and were treated with the minimum of consideration. Things have changed, sometimes under pressure from the market and the realization of the direct or indirect costs of leaving, and we have started to conduct “exit interviews”.

These interviews have two aims: one is often overtly to understand why an employee is leaving, and the other, more implicitly, is to try to leave him or her with one last good impression, so as not to scupper the employer brand in a competitive market where the voice of the employee is more credible than that of the company (Your employee experience is your employer brand).

I see two problems with these exit interviews:

1°) They enable us to understand why this employee left, but there are so many personal variables involved in a decision that it’s difficult to draw generalizations that can be applied to all other employees to retain them in the future.

2°) For this employee, it’s already too late. The interview will not retain him.

What makes an employee decide to quit?

I recently saw a serious study carried out into the reasons why employees stay and those that lead them to resign.

While its findings won’t surprise anyone, it does have the merit of confirming things that, I hope, everyone has already understood (

Why Employees Quit).

What keeps employees:

  1. Engagement and recognition: Employees stay when they feel appreciated and recognized for their contributions, as illustrated by the practice of “stay conversations” where the manager regularly checks to see if the employee experience is positive.
  2. Opportunities for development and growth: Having career development discussions and feeling supported in one’s professional development is an important factor in retention.
  3. Work-life balance: Employees value a good work-life balance, and appreciate managers who recognize this importance.
  4. Listening and authenticity: Employees stay when their manager sincerely listens to their concerns and tries to understand their needs, even if not all requests can be met immediately.

What drives employees to quit:

  1. Lack of support and meaningful interaction with the manager: Rana’s case shows that a lack of discussion on topics other than day-to-day tasks (such as career development or personal concerns) can lead to frustration and, eventually, departure.
  2. Lack of growth prospects: When employees feel they are stagnating or not progressing in their careers, they are more likely to seek opportunities elsewhere.
  3. Feeling overworked: Overwork, with no time to perform core tasks during normal working hours, leads to burnout and dissatisfaction.
  4. Ignorance of implicit promises: Employees may express frustrations that hide a deeper need (such as a commitment to quality work or a desire to progress), and ignoring these “hidden commitments” can drive them away.
  5. Departure risk triggers: Changes of manager or responsibilities are identified as times when employees are more inclined to look for other jobs.

No surprise: what drives employees to leave is the opposite of what leads them to stay.

More interesting is the trigger: many people wonder about their future with their employer, but at some point there’s something that triggers them to quit.

Here, we’re told it’s a change of manager or responsibilities, which is understandable. It’s usually the start of a new phase, and if you’re dissatisfied or plagued by doubts from the outset, you can’t project yourself all the way to the finish line.

But I’d like to add another factor that I’ve often observed, and over which the company has no control: the conversations a person may have with friends and family about their career, work and remuneration, which may trigger the act of resigning. We underestimate the real or perceived social pressure resulting from comparisons with friends and, even more so, spouses. It’s not so much one’s own situation that’s going to be the direct reason for leaving, but the way others look at it.

Silence is not acceptance

The same article suggests the use of “stay” interviews, as opposed to departure interviews, to identify the existence of causes for resignation, or rather their perception, before the triggering event.

The notion of perception is important here, in my opinion: the cause of resignation may exist objectively, but the employee may not yet give it any importance or see it, but he or she may also have an erroneous perception of his or her situation.

I hear a lot of managers tell me “so-and-so is great, he does his job, never complains or complains”.

For me, this is a warning factor: these employees are the ones who are going to leave you without you seeing it coming overnight, and their decision will be irrevocable. Just because they don’t say anything doesn’t mean they don’t think so, it’s just their personality and they expect you to do your job as HR and manager, which is precisely to understand and anticipate them.

If you decide that they have to complain to deserve your attention and that, otherwise, you won’t bother with them, you’re sending out a rather damaging signal: they only deserve your interest when you can be a problem for them. As for their own problems…

As for those who keep saying “I’m going to quit”, I’ve noticed that they’re the ones who do it the least. Why is that? I’ve come to the conclusion – but this is just my own experience – that these are highly engaged employees, who love the company and their job, and it’s just a cry from the heart that says “I love you, but I need a little attention in return“.

But in the end, both profiles have something in common: they want attention, and it’s to your advantage to pay attention to them and talk to them (not about their goals, their projects, their performance, just about them), maybe once or twice a year, or if you occasionally sense that something isn’t quite right (How to Ask Whether an Employee Is Happy at Work).

Le travail est un produit qu’on améliore sans cesse

Pour le coup c’est une idée qui, je pense, va prêter à controverse chez nombre de puristes mais je souscrit à l’idée que le travail est un produit que le salarié s’achète pour répondre à ses besoins (Reimagining Work as a Product).

Borrowing from Clayton Christensen’s jobs to be done theory, which posits that people “hire” products or services to fulfill specific needs in their lives, what happens when managers ask, “What do employees hire their jobs to do for them?”

[…]

“Within organizations, there are specialized teams solely dedicated to generating customer insights and enhancing the customer experience,” the Columbia Business School professor Stephan Meier writes in his new book, The Employee Advantage, which reports on Eli Lilly’s employee experience. “A similar level of attention has to be given to employees and their experiences.”

[…]

Jessica Zwaan, the chief operating officer at Talentful, suggests that all companies—not just those in the gig economy—think about work not only as a product but as a subscription product. People make a purchasing decision every month when they choose to remain employed and can cancel that subscription at any time.

[…]

To better understand what leads employees to “purchase” their work each day, Dart has applied tools from product research, relying on qualitative interviews and other data collection techniques to understand what people really want from their jobs. His results reveal that their needs go far beyond commonly discussed factors such as income, purpose, and belonging. For example, some employees report hiring their jobs to give them interesting puzzles to solve, tools and materials to build with, messes to tidy, a stage to perform on and an adoring audience, broken things to repair, worthy opponents against whom to compete, teams to amplify their contribution, a platform from which to make the world a better place, or the opportunity to leave a legacy. Some people want their jobs to help them escape monotonous or challenging home lives, spend time with friends, provide structure to their days, seek refuge from personal challenges, repay a debt to the family that helped them get where they are, or see those around them shine. Even when employees talk about pay—an obvious reason to choose to work—they often talk about the deeper motivations that compensation serves, such as caring for their families or demonstrating to others that they are living up to their potential.

These deeper reasons for choosing a job don’t typically show up in traditional HR instrumentation.

[…]

Managers who take this approach try to balance the company’s labor needs with what each employee finds most rewarding.

I’ll come back to this concept in more detail in the future, as I’m certain that it really is an approach that works (I’ve used it myself to some extent), but that it’s bound to provoke strong reactions because of the paradigm shift it implies.

But here’s where we are: just as a business constantly listens to its customers to improve its products so that they continue to buy them, they need to do the same with work so that it continues to do what employees expect of it.

Businesses don’t know why their employees stay

In fact, we’ve been repeating the same thing from different angles since the beginning of this article.

What makes you stop buying a product or subscribing to a service? It just doesn’t deliver what you expect , or doesn’t seem worth the effort it takes to pay for it.

That’s why businesses, and digital platforms in particular, use a whole host of processes to adapt to your expectations.

You never really make the decision to stop, but you no longer see the benefit, the value, of continuing.

With work it’s a bit the same: we don’t quit, we’re just given no reason to stay.

By shifting the paradigm, by trying to understand what it is, deep down, that makes everyone want to stay, we avoid ever having to try to understand why they left when the damage is already done.

Bottom line

Rather than the vague and general notion of engagement, I like to think of it as “the reason to stay”, which needs to be treated on a highly individualized basis and updated at regular intervals. This goes beyond careers and remuneration, and touches on hidden aspirations that we never try to get people to express, on what people really want from their work for them. And sometimes these are very simple things, perhaps a detail to us, but very important to them.

You won’t get these reasons if you don’t try to find out what they are. And you won’t be given them during the exit interview either.

It’s certainly a paradigm shift for HR and managers, but the day comes when we can’t hide the limits of a model that’s run out of steam.

But in the age of feedback (Feedback and secondary data: how to put data at the service of employee experience?) and the quantified organization(The quantified organization: Grail or Big Brother?), there’s no shortage of ways to manage this, provided we change our mindset.

But let’s stop taking the problem the wrong way: an employee doesn’t leave, he just decides not to stay.

Image:  resignation by shisu_ka  via Shutterstock

Bertrand DUPERRIN
Bertrand DUPERRINhttps://www.duperrin.com/english
Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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