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Roughly 42 million U.S. employees, or more than one in four workers, will leave their jobs this year to go work for another company, according to the recently released 2018 Retention Report: Truth and Trends in Turnover.
It doesn't have to be this way. "More than three in four employees (77 percent) who quit could have been retained by employers," write the authors of the study, which was conducted by the Tennessee-based Work Institute using data from more than 234,000 exit interviews.
Turnover trends such as these are compelling many companies and managers to up their games when it comes to their employee retention strategies. And through better retention, these firms are hoping to avoid the high costs of turnover. For example, the retention report finds that U.S. employers will pay $600 billion in turnover costs in 2018. Companies can expect that annual cost to increase to $680 billion by 2020, according to the study.
But achieving success in retaining talent can be challenging for another reason: the current labor market, which by historic standards is in a very tight, low unemployment phase. The U.S. Labor Department announced this summer that, for the first time on record, jobs outnumbered job seekers.
"We now have more jobs than people to do them, which means our labor [shortages] are going to get worse," Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) President and CEO Johnny C. Taylor said in his opening address at the SHRM 2018 annual meeting in Chicago.
That development is a "really alarming" one for organizations who are trying to retain talent, says Gabriel Stavsky, a talent management consultant with Retensa Employee Retention Strategies. "Think about the implications of that. Employees will have that upper hand," Stavsky says.
Why do employees leave? According to the Retention Report, the three top specific reasons for employees to leave jobs in 2017 were career development (21 percent), work-life balance (13 percent), and manager behavior (11 percent). Experts say these reasons all fall under one broad umbrella reason of why employees leave companies: their employer is not meeting their expectations and needs.
Armed with this knowledge, managers can strengthen their retention strategies...