When you lose a team member or leader that you spent a lot of time and effort to recruit, train, develop, and invest in – it can really hurt. The financial impact, according to research from Employee Benefits News, can be up to 33% of their annual salary, but it goes far beyond the numbers. Every employee who leaves drains your organization of the knowledge, skills, and context that they built up – leaving you to start again when you try to replace them.
As a result, retaining your top talent should be a key priority – so that you maximize the compounding effects of building a stable team for the long term. In this article, we’ll aim to tackle this challenge by looking at some of the main reasons why people change jobs. If you can understand and mitigate these areas in your company, you’ll retain key people for much longer and reap the myriad of benefits that come with increased loyalty and accumulated experience.
The Top 7 Reasons People Change Jobs
Here at The Renaissance Network, we work with a large number of Education and Impact companies to help them recruit and retain top talent. Based on these experiences, here are the top 7 reasons that people look to change jobs:
1. Lack of Career Advancement
Employees want to see a clear path for growth within their organizations. If career advancement opportunities are not visible, appear limited, or are actually non-existent, talented individuals are likely to look elsewhere. The lack of upward mobility can make workers feel stagnant, leading them to seek roles where their skills and ambitions are recognized and rewarded with promotions or development opportunities.
2. Major Life Events
Significant life changes, such as getting married, having children, or relocating, often prompt people to reassess their career choices. As they assess their new situation, they often deeply consider the need for better work-life balance, more flexibility, or a higher-paying position. In fact, these sorts of major transitions often encourage individuals to re-evaluate their long-term goals, with a job change often being the key to aligning better with their new circumstances.
3. Jumping Off a Sinking Ship
When a company is struggling due to financial instability, mass layoffs, a declining industry, poor product-market fit, new owner rumors, or a myriad of other reasons, employees may jump ship before it fully sinks. The uncertainty of staying in a precarious situation often drives people to find more secure employment that they can rely on for their own long-term future. Job security is a major factor in career satisfaction, and people tend to leave when they sense that staying may not be in their best long-term interest. No one wants to be stuck without options if the worst-case scenario ever comes to be.
4. Where Blame is the Norm
Unhealthy workplace cultures, particularly those where blame-shifting is prevalent, push employees to look for healthier environments where accountability is a key component of the value stack. When employees feel scapegoated or unfairly blamed for failures, it creates a sense of injustice and demoralization. In such cultures, trust breaks down, and people leave to find a place where accountability is shared and learning from mistakes is encouraged – because that’s the only reliable way to both personal and professional growth.
5. Problems with a Direct Manager
The relationship with your direct manager is one of the most important factors that determine job satisfaction. A poor relationship—whether due to micromanagement, lack of support, or outright conflict—can drive people away. The cliché is that employees often leave managers, not companies. This is because an ineffective manager can make even the best job intolerable, leading them to seek a healthier and more supportive working relationship.
6. Unhappy with Compensation
One of the most common reasons employees leave their jobs is dissatisfaction with the compensation structure. This could be what they’re being paid or even if they feel others are underpaid for their work. When people feel they or the team are under-compensated for the value they bring or discover that their skills are worth more in the current market, they often choose to seek better opportunities elsewhere. This can be impacted by various factors, including base salary, bonuses, and a range of different employee perks and benefits. Unsurprisingly, money drives a lot of decision-making when it comes to sticking with a job.
7. Ready for a Change
Sometimes, people simply feel it’s time for a change – and it’s got nothing to do with you as a company. Whether they’re seeking new challenges, exploring different industries, or trying to avoid burnout, individuals may leave even a good job for the sake of variety and personal growth. A desire to explore new paths and refresh their professional journey can be a powerful motivator to start fresh somewhere else. This is especially true in our modern context, where people tend to want to move jobs every 3 years for no other reason than wanting to look for new challenges and new environments.
Other Reasons for Changing Jobs
Of course, the top seven don’t cover absolutely everything, and so the list wouldn’t be complete without offering some honorable mentions in terms of reasons that people choose to change jobs:
- Declining career satisfaction. If a specific career choice is not providing meaning, fulfillment, and satisfaction, then an employee can choose to look elsewhere in search of these key components of happiness.
- Change in leadership direction. When the top management in a company changes direction or strategy, employees who don’t believe in the change or buy into the strategy will often leave.
- Burnout. When an employee is overloaded with stress due to an excessive workload, the resulting burnout can often lead to them seeking better working conditions somewhere else.
- Seeking new skills and experiences. We are all wired for novelty, and when that fades, employees can leave in search of new skills and experiences.
- Work flexibility. If a company forces a return to the office (after remote working) or doesn’t allow for flexibility in terms of time or deliverables – that can lead to employees leaving who are seeking a specific version of work-life balance.
- Changes in values or goals. Sometimes, it is a change in goals or values from the employee that forces them to reconsider their career and make a necessary change to align with the new version of themselves.
- Not succeeding in the current role. If an employee is not achieving what is expected of them in a particular role, they will often leave proactively – especially if they are aware that things are not working out.
- Underappreciated. We all seek validation for our efforts, so when an employee is not receiving the acknowledgment and appreciation that they feel they deserve, they will look for it elsewhere.
- Lack of training. Employees who don’t receive the sort of training that they think they need to perform their job tend to feel like they haven’t been given the resources and skills that they need to succeed – and this can lead to them leaving if the gap is large enough.
- Lack of control. We all naturally want a level of autonomy in our job, and when an employee doesn’t have enough control over their time and tasks, they might choose to leave because of those feelings.
- Lack of information. Employees need data and context to feel informed and involved, as well as to effectively do their jobs. Information can be delivered in the form of company updates, performance dashboards, and strategic briefs, to name a few.
The list could go on and on, but this list captures a lot of the themes and patterns that lead employees to change jobs. Finally, let’s look at some practical strategies to avoid this happening to your team.
How Do You Retain Great Employees?
So far, all we’ve focused on are the negative reasons that can lead to employees wanting to change jobs. But that was intentional because if you can mitigate against these, then you’re well on your way to retaining your top talent for the long term.
Here are five practical things that you can do to achieve this:
- Have regular one-on-one check-ins. People management is all about creating touchpoints and opportunities for communication so that you can identify problems early and solve them before they grow big enough to necessitate someone quitting. This can be achieved through regular one-on-one meetings where you check in and see how someone is doing, find out what they are feeling, and try to fix any issues that they’re experiencing. This builds trust and loyalty when done well.
- Focus on employee development and growth. None of us want to feel like our career is standing still. As an employer, you should be focusing time and effort on facilitating career development and growth for every one of your team members. This can entail investing in learning and development initiatives, but it also means presenting tangible opportunities for growth where an employee is pushed slightly out of their comfort zone and given the license to fail – so that they can do more than ever before. Read further to learn more TRN insight about career learning pathways.
- Provide each employee with clear direction. We all want a vision to align with, and as leaders – you need to provide each of your employees with a clear direction. When your vision is compelling and well-articulated, people can get on board and stay for a long time.
- Make them feel like they are part of the team. As humans, we are wired to seek belonging. It cannot be underestimated how important it is for employees to feel like they are a valued part of the team. This goes beyond work and taps into the innate psychology that we all carry.
- Listen, listen, and listen some more. Finally, the key meta-skill that lies under all of these is the ability to listen. The more you can do this and stay attentive to the needs of your people, the longer they will choose to contribute to your company’s mission. Listen, listen, listen.
TRN: Building World-Class Teams to Impact Education and Communities
If you are looking for help in attracting and retaining key people for your growing organization, then The Renaissance Network is here to help! Get in touch today, and let’s explore what a potential collaboration could look like.
