Employee turnover can hit companies hard, especially when you lose a top-performing employee. It’s highly recommended that employers give their employees possibilities to climb the corporate or trade ladder. When you have an employee that shows potential, their ambition needs to be grown, not stifled. However, allowing or pressuring top talent to overwork themselves only leads to burn out and turnover.
Encourage, but Don’t Overwhelm
A good boss is not someone who coddles their employees. On the contrary, putting more responsibilities on top-performing employees indicates that the employer trusts and sees potential in them. However, pushing an employee to exceed their own expectations and placing pressure on an employee to not fail are different.
Your employees need to see advancing in the workplace as a choice, not a demand. Rather than presenting more responsibilities as a requirement, introduce them as opportunities and ask if that request is plausible. It’s a heartbreaking situation when a top-performing employee quits because they’re given an unrealistic and underappreciated workload.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is giving a single employee too much responsibility. This often happens gradually without management noticing—a single employee is beginning to wear several hats at work, has exclusive knowledge on operating many vital processes, has unshared access to multiple sources of information, etc. It seems easy to just have one person take care of many problems, and that one person often has a “if I want it done right, I have to do it myself” mentality.
What happens when that employee quits, moves, gets sick, or leaves the company for any other reason? Business owners will find themselves shocked at how much work that one employee did, making training a new employee to full in his or her shoes time consuming. While encouraging employees to advance in the workplace is a great way to keep employee retention, employers should never give an employee so much responsibility that their business will be severely damaged if that employee resigns.
Turnover is a problem. Refered provides a solution through an incentivized employee recruitment program. Keep your employees and gain new ones today.
