Why Good Employees Quit
Once upon a time, I made a decision to leave a job. I wanted to no longer have to mute my voice or my presence. I knew I deserved to belong, to be heard, and be appreciated for all that I have to offer. So I left. I was good at my job, and I even had development opportunities in front of me. But I left. And boy, am I glad that I did.
Now my story might be unique, but the feelings of being unimportant, unheard, and devalued are not uncommon. I’m sure that every one of you reading this has experienced those feelings in some capacity in their professional life. That is why good employees quit their jobs. I now make it my mission to give employees a voice where I didn’t have one. I work to fix the hiccups, and the ill-fitting feeling that strikes before employees quit so they won’t feel forced to leave.
To Fit is To Belong
From an employees’ perspective, managers don’t have a clue what to do to keep their best people. So they leave them feeling devalued and taken for granted. As a result, employees feel so disregarded that they mentally and emotionally check out from their work and become overwhelmingly disengaged.
This occurs often and all over the place. Employees that experience this can be the best in their fields. They can be doing work they are passionate about and serving people in a way that matters to them. But if they don’t fit with the organization, if their managers don’t see that they have a space and a voice, they will continue to quit.
We all deserve to belong at work.
Today, more people are quitting their jobs than ever before. Employees everywhere are taking their futures into their own hands and prioritizing what truly matters–their wellbeing.
I offer a course for managers to learn three crucial ways to make their employees feel like they belong.
Step 1
To make your employees feel like they belong, you must get to know them first. Take the time and put in the effort to learn your employees’ passions. By knowing what motivates your team members and what they truly care about, you can better connect with them and connect their work to them. The more invested and connected they are within your organization, the more likely they are to want to stay. The more they will feel like they belong and have put down roots.
Step 2
The next step is strategic. Once managers build a deeper connection, like the one mentioned in step 1, they must continue to nourish it. For example, managers should lay out a plan for consistent one-on-one meetings. Create a system for checking in and cementing this connection so that it becomes routine. Making your employees and their well-being a priority will never leave them feeling like they don’t belong.
Step 3
This third step is perhaps the most complicated but also imperative. Have you ever had a good rapport or a solid relationship with your immediate manager but felt like senior leadership wasn’t aware of your existence? Organizations need unity across all levels. Managers need to fill a crucial void and mitigate the disconnect between top management and frontline employees. If an employee belongs, they must feel that belonging in terms of the whole organization, not just their little corner.
There is much more depth to each of these steps, but take the course, or work to implement them into your management style, and your good employees will know they are taken care of and truly looked after by you, their caring leaders.
