5 High Turnover Rate Causes & Solutions

Are you tired of your business serving as a rotating door for employees? Maybe you’re unsure why this is the case in the first place. In this post, we’ll discuss the most common high turnover rate causes and offer solutions that you can begin implementing to combat this difficult problem.

HRDQ offers a fully customizable virtual training library that can assist in the long-term growth of your employees. Explore the Reproducible Training Library.

High Turnover Rate Causes

Below are the five most common causes of a high turnover rate:

Limited Opportunity for Career Growth

There’s nothing more discouraging to an employee than knowing there is little to no opportunity for career growth within the company. Career development encompasses a variety of facets, including structured career pathing, opportunities to learn new skills, and increased responsibilities. When none of these are offered, employees become unmotivated to do their job and look to other companies to help them grow in their careers.

Set a plan in place for your employees' career journey: Ongoing Performance Development

Solution: Offer Employee Development Training

If your company is lacking opportunity for career growth, it’s time to create opportunity. The easiest way to do this by offering employee development training. Invest in cultivating the skills they need to best complete their jobs and continue to create new training programs as industry needs change. Also be sure to reward top employees with new responsibilities for them to tackle. Overall, showing that you care about the success of your team is key for reducing your turnover rate.

Use the HRDQ Reproducible Training Library to begin designing your training programs.

Poor Management

Poor management also contributes greatly to high turnover rates. There are several ways your managerial team may be underperforming, including possessing poor communication skills, being disorganized, not giving praise, and overworking employees. A supervisor who doesn’t listen to the needs of their team will cause distrust and general dislike, which can inspire employees to seek out new opportunities with better management.

Solution: Develop Your Managers

Training is crucial for both providing career growth and developing your underperforming managers. Be sure to create a training program that focuses on key supervisory skills, including coaching, conflict management, emotional intelligence, decision-making, and more. Each of your superiors should take the course and be expected to maintain a high level of excellence. Have weekly check-ins with your managers to ensure they’re on course. If you don’t see improvement, additional training will be necessary. 

A helpful tool to sharpen your supervisory skills: Supervisory Skills Questionnaire

Incorrect Fit

Employees will quickly grow tired of a job that they don’t like. When they’re placed in a role that’s not the right fit for them in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, and interests, they’ll begin to look for roles that are a better match.

Solution: Assess Your Employees & Applicants

Before placing your employees in a new role, provide them with a soft skills assessment to ensure their strengths and weaknesses align with the requirements of the job. Providing a quick assessment is all it takes to prevent employees from landing in unfit positions that cause unhappiness.

An additional resource to ensure your employees are set up for success from the get-go: Onboarding Customizable Course

Negative Workplace Culture

Don’t underestimate the power of a negative work environment. Having poor or no workplace culture often leads to hostility, lack of teamwork, unorganized processes, lack of accountability, and a generally toxic atmosphere. Nobody wants to work in an organization without strong core values and a mission that’s not upheld.

Solution: Develop a Strong Workplace Culture

Do you believe your company culture is lacking? Then it’s time to reevaluate your core values and mission and ensure they’re being upheld throughout daily work life. Luckily, if you’re already taking steps to improve career growth opportunities, develop your managerial team, and ensure employees land in the right job, you’re already taking steps in the right direction. You should also define values you’d like your employees to uphold and reward them when they do so.

View our blog, What is Workplace Culture & How Can You Improve It? for more tips and recommendations.

Insufficient Pay & Benefits

Pay and benefits affect your employees’ livelihoods. If they feel they aren’t being taken care of by their company, on top of experiencing any of the above problems, they will be more inclined to look for a job that accommodates them correctly for the type and amount of work they’re doing.

Solution: Invest Upfront

According to the Center for American Progress, it costs businesses between 16.1% - 20.4% of an employee's annual salary to replace them. That’s some serious money!

All in all, it’s more beneficial to pay your employees better outright than to lowball them knowing they’ll eventually be replaced. Slightly increasing pay/benefits or simply ensuring they match industry standards will actually provide your business with serious savings.

The same goes for training programs, as well. It’s better to invest in the long-term success of your employee than to spend revenue training new hires over and over again. 

Decrease Your Turnover Rate with HRDQ

We hope these high turnover rate causes and solutions help you identify problem areas and begin creating a plan to resolve them. If you’re ready to invest in decreasing your turnover rate, get started with HRDQ today. Our virtual training options can help you provide career growth for your employees, improve your managers, better match workers to the right jobs, and develop your company culture. If you’re ready to experience the power of online training, view our virtual classes to get started!

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