Managing Turnover
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How many Motivators (& De-motivators) are there that influence employee attraction, retention & turnover decisions?
So far, we’ve catalogued 296 distinct Motivators (& De-motivators) from over 9 million answers to the questions as below.
We asked employees to describe and explain:
Why they were attracted to their organisation.
Why they have stayed.
Why they would stay in the future.
Why they might consider leaving in the future.
Why they would recommend the organisation as a good place to work (or not).
What they expect from their organisation.
What makes their organisation “a truly great place to work” (or not).
Why they have decided to leave their organisation (if they have).
Narrative text questions are the only way to discover these motivators. We then apply some serious linguistic analysis by trained research analysts to come up with the main themes.
They range from the amount of support employees get, to the educational opportunities they are looking for, to the geographical location of the workplace, all the way through to a love of driving buses (at least for the bus drivers).
We can see 3 broad groups of Motivators.
Tangible Benefits – What employees get.
Intangible Benefits – How they feel and how they are treated.
Work Enablers – How to get the job done.
And we see a lot of differences in how these Motivators get activated amongst the Retention Zone employees, the Turnover Zone employees, and the At Risk Zone employees. (See BPA’s previous post for definitions of these zones).
For example, people might be attracted by the type of work, or the pay, or the opportunities (all Tangible Benefits) but they stay because of the people they work with and the enjoyable experiences they have (all Intangible Benefits).
But the more frustrations that employees experience with breakdowns in the Work Enablers, the less likely they are to stay in the Retention Zone.
Issues with teamwork, support, communication, quality, management, problem-solving and workload allocation all feature here as breakdowns in Work Enablers. If left unaddressed, they pave the way for employees to migrate to the At Risk Zone and, eventually, to the Turnover Zone.
In the Turnover Zone, employees return their attention to the Tangible Benefits that brought them to the organisation in the first place.
This becomes their narrative for leaving (even though the breakdown in Work Enablers was the primary cause) and for seriously looking at the Attraction Factors with other organisations.
In the light of this analysis, can you confidently say that you are giving enough attention to the Work Enablers in your organisation?
