Yeah, money and benefits are important. If they weren’t most people wouldn’t be showing up to work today. But when it comes to overall satisfaction with work and your employer, it usually comes down to management. The highest hidden cost in business today is turnover. Every time an employee is turned over the cost to the business is an average of 20% of the gross annual compensation of that position. With average compensation of around $50,000, that means that the average cost for an employee to leave a company is about $10,000!
Keeping that in mind, turnover rates are at their highest levels in 18 years as the great jobs economy presents no shortage of opportunities for those who’re less than satisfied with their employer. Given the cost of turnover, there’s a great incentive for businesses to focus on retention and what it is that’s most likely to improve it.
In other words, workplace development. According to LinkedIn’s just completed Workforce Learning Report, 94% of employees would be more likely to stay with their employer if they had regular opportunity to continue to learn and develop their skills. Makes perfect sense to me. It also shows that very few people are happy with being complacent, which is what every employer should want in an employee, but every bad boss might not want to take ownership of this.
Moral of this story is that if you want to keep your best people and save on the cost and headaches of turnover, take a deeper look into what your employees are interested in.
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