Why people leave a company
Excerpts from book
First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Diffeerntly. by Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffma
Early this year, Arun, an old friend who
is a senior software designer, got an offer from a
prestigious international firm to work in its India
operations developing a specialized software. He was
thrilled by the offer. He had heard a lot about the CEO of
this company, a charismatic man often quoted in the business
press for his visionary attitude. The salary was great. The
company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly
human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office, the
very best technology, even a canteen that served superb
food. Twice Arun was sent abroad for training. "My learning
curve is the sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he
joined. "It's a real high working with such cutting edge
technology." Last week, less than eight months after he
joined, Arun walked out of the job. He has no other offer in
hand but he said he couldn't take it anymore. Nor,
apparently, could several other people in his department who
have also quit recently. The CEO is distressed about the
high employee turnover. He's distressed about the money he's
spent in training them. He's distressed because he can't
figure out what happened.
Why did this talented employee leave despite a top
salary? Arun quit for the same reason that drives many good
people away.
The answer lies in one of the largest
studies undertaken by the
Gallup Organization. The
study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers
and was published in a book called First Break All The
Rules.
It came up with this surprising finding: If you're losing
good
people, look to their immediate supervisor.
Besides salary, he, the immediate superior, is the reason
people stay and thrive in an
organization. And he's
the reason why they quit, taking their
knowledge,
experience and contacts with them. Often, straight to the
competition.
"People leave managers not companies," write the authors
Marcus
Buckingham and Curt Coffman. "So much money has
been thrown at the
challenge of keeping good people -
in the form of better pay, better perks and better training
- when, in the end, turnover is mostly a manager issue." If
you have a turnover problem, look first to your managers.
Are they driving people away?
Beyond a certain point, an employee's primary need has less
to do
with money, and more to do with how he's treated
and how valued he
feels. Much of this depends directly
on the immediate manager. And yet, bad bosses seem to happen
to good people everywhere. A Fortune magazine survey some
years ago found that nearly 75 per cent of employees have
suffered at the hands of difficult superiors. You can leave
one job to find - you guessed it, another wolf in a
pin-stripe suit in the next one.
Of all the workplace stressors, a bad boss is possibly the worst, directly impacting the emotional health and productivity of employees. Here are some all-too common tales from the battlefield:
Dev, an engineer, still shudders as he recalls the almost daily firings his boss subjected him to, usually in front of his subordinates. His boss emasculated him with personal, insulting remarks. In the face of such rage, Dev completely lost the courage to speak up. But when he reached home depressed, he poured himself a few drinks, and magically, became as abusive as the boss himself. Only,it would come out on his wife and children. Not only was his work life in the doldrums, his marriage began cracking up too.
Another employee Rajat recalls the Chinese torture his boss put him through after a minor disagreement. He cut him off completely. He bypassed him in any decision that needed to be taken. "He stopped sending me any papers or files," says Rajat. "It was humiliating sitting at an empty table. I knew nothing and no one told me anything." Unable to bear this corporate Siberia, he finally quit.
HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find public humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave, but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he starts looking for another job.
When people cannot retort openly in anger, they do so by
passive
aggression. By digging their heels in and
slowing down. By doing only what they are told to do and no
more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information. Dev
says: "If you work for a jerk, you basically want to get him
into trouble. You don't have your heart and soul in the
job."
Different managers can stress out employees in different
ways - by
being too controlling, too suspicious, too
pushy, too critical, too nit-picky. But they forget that
workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents.
When this goes on too long, an employee will
quit - often over
seemingly trivial issue. It isn't
the 100th blow that knocks a good man down. It's the 99 that
went before. And while it's true that people leave jobs for
all kinds of reasons - for better opportunities or for
circumstantial reasons, many who leave would have stayed -
had it not been for one man constantly telling them, as
Arun's boss did: "You are dispensable. I can find dozens
like you."
While it seems like there are plenty of other fish
especially in
today's waters, consider for a moment
the cost of losing a talented employee. There's the cost of
finding a replacement. The cost of training the replacement.
The cost of not having someone to do the job in the
meantime. The loss of clients and contacts the person had
with the industry. The loss of morale in co-workers. The
loss of trade secrets this person may now share with others.
Plus, of course, the loss of the company's reputation. Every person who leaves a corporation then becomes its ambassador, for better or for worse. We all know of large IT companies that people would love to join and large television companies few want to go near. In both cases, former employees have left to tell their tales.
"Any company trying to compete must figure out a way to
engage the mind of every employee," Jack Welch of GE once
said. Much of a company's value lies "between the ears of
its employees". If it's bleeding talent, it's bleeding
value. Unfortunately, many senior executives busy travelling
the world, signing new deals and developing a vision for the
company, have little idea of what may be going on at home.
That deep within an organization that otherwise does all the
right things, one man could be driving its best people away.