Why Your Top Performaning Employees Quit

It's like clockwork. Every year a portion of our top 20% of the employees from a performance standpoint decides it's time to move on.

 

You and your co-workers know you would never fire them but here is why you could lose them...

 

It's not that the remaining 80% is unimportant, however, from a productivity, growth, and brainpower perspective, the top 20% of any group is critical. Moreover, these are the employees that are very difficult to replace.

 

Reasons in order...

 

#1 Money: This one was obvious

 

Roughly 46% of the employees that left did so because of money concerns. To be honest, I thought this would be a much higher percentage. I think the most alarming stat to me here is that only 9%  had maxed out their pay potential.

 

Just because a engineer was hired 3 years ago at $70K and currently makes $77K does not mean that is the going rate simply because you built the comp plan that way. If your HR group is not benchmarking what these positions are really making in the world, you better.

 

#2 Unchallenged: At what point does workplace monotony kill someone's drive?
      The Stats: 23% showed this was their #1 reason for leaving.

 

One of the forms was completed by an employee that had the exact same job function for 3 years. He is a great example of this point. This employee was in the 20% tier because he had mastered his position and was viewed by many as someone literally doing the work of 2 people. His performance reviews were flawless. BUT - and here is the killer, he didn't feel that way. He thrived on pressure and having a huge workload was natural to him. Although his manager didn't see it, this guy was bored out of his skull and wanted more. Year after year he exceeded every expectation on his review and he was compensated for it but that was it. In this case, it wasn't a matter of compensation, it was strictly responsibility.

 

#3 Too Challenged: Toss 'em in and see if they swim.
      The Stats: 21% showed this was their #1 reason for leaving.

 

Remember we are only talking about the 20% tier so the people that listed this reason, are not the lazy people of the bunch. They are the ones fed up with bureaucracy, hiring freezes, lack of cooperation, undefined goals, and poor technology. You cannot ask someone to complete 20 tasks and then give them inferior tools and personnel. A lot of employees will struggle through these problems because of their dedication to the company, however, at some point, the fight is no longer sustainable. The employee will either leave, OR , become so unmotivated that they lose their star status and become a normal employee and thus under perform.

 

#4 Dead Company: AKA Death by Boredom
      The Stats: 38 records (21%) showed this was their #1 reason for leaving

 

If the leadership team of your company is constantly drab regardless of the company's growth or the goals achieved, you are in trouble. All employees want money and to be challenged but they don't want to have to self-motivate 100% of the time. For example, I worked for a small company that hadn't created a new product in 10 years. Nothing ever changed and to make matters worse, the executives were all stiffs.

 

Read full list from the dumblittleman

Why Top Employees Quit

In a large company this is a problem that we have with our IT groups in particular. I reached out a to a few peers with other companies (one is an IT exec and one is actually a Group President) and as an exercise, we took a bunch of historical data and started identifying the factors that led to the annual exodus. We focused only the top 20% of the employees from a performance standpoint. It's not that the remaining 80% is unimportant, however, from a productivity, growth, and brainpower perspective, the top 20% of any group is critical. Moreover, these are the employees that are very difficult to replace.
To do this, we reviewed notes from exit interviews, cross referenced annual reviews and ultimately came up with 178 voluntary terminations from people that would have been considered in the top 20%.

To try and keep focused on macro issues, we consolidated the responses and placed them into categories:

• Money
• Unchallenged
• Too Challenged
• Dead Company
• Watch your Levels (and the BS)

Here is the breakdown of the categories. I know someone is bound to ask why it doesn't add up so... Please keep in mind that this will not add up to 178 because several people insisted on listing 2-3 reasons when the question only asked for 1 reason.

Read on: http://www.dumblittleman.com/2006/09/why-top-employees-quit.html

There is hope for the world

Best news I read this week: Whoohoo!

In TV's worst spring in recent memory, a startling number of Americans drifted away from television the past two months: More than 2.5 million fewer people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last year, statistics show.

 

Maybe they're outside in the garden. They could be playing.

 

 

"Metacrap" is a very strong, coherent, pointed critique of the dream of metadata.

Cory Doctorow - People are lazy, so they misclassify because they can't be bothered to properly classify.  We can't all agree; everything is miscellaneous, as you say, so we can't all agree on the best way to classify information, and so on.  So, that's a kind of sampler of the reasons that the idea that we'll all make it all work is so flawed.

They are just a lot of categories of information that we can't draw lines between. . .

 

Read more here

The Web destroys categories, disciplines and hierarchies

"IT" Has Made Everything Miscellaneous 

It's a powerful idea: from org charts to science, from music to retail theory, from government to education, every field of human endeavor is tinged with hierarchy, and every hierarchy is under assault from the Internet.

 

And unlike many business/tech books, whose simple thesis could be stated in a single New Yorker article, but which are nevertheless expanded to book-length for commercial reasons, every chapter in Everything is Miscellaneous brings new insight to the subject. This is a hell of a book. Link

Higher education industry is becoming a racket...

Buy our product or be condemned to life of penury, and our product can easily cost well over $100,000.

Higher Education Conformity - Is a college degree really a sign of competence? Or is it chiefly a signal to employers that you've mastered the ability to obey and conform? College degree chiefly as mark of one's ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end -- whether in library carrels or office cubicles -- does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned -- although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.

Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-"team-player." You will do anything. You will grovel.

College can be the most amazingly enlightening experience of a lifetime. I loved almost every minute of it...

 

Read more from:

http://www.alternet.org/story/51316