Top 5 Reasons Great Employees Stay

There are many reasons why great employees stay.  Here are the top 5 reasons great employees stay:

1.  Great Boss–  I have read countless articles stating the top reason why employees stay is because they have a great boss.  I completely agree.  I have had many bosses over the years and the number 1 reason I have left is because I lacked confidence and trust in my boss.  If you can’t trust your boss has the organization and your best interests in mind, it is time to start looking for a great boss.  It is unfortunate there are so many poor bosses out there today and many of them lack basic management skills that are needed to make their employees successful.  Often times people are placed into leadership roles they have no business leading and this drives great people to leave organizations.
2. Trust–  The second issue is the employees start to lose trust in the organization and the leadership.  Once trust is gone, the great employees will start to pull back and give less than 100%.  Trust plays a major role in keeping great employees.  These days many organizations are going through significant changes.  Often those changes might lead to leaders not being 100% transparent.  Several years ago, I led a large team through a series of painful acquisitions.  At the end of the day, I knew people were going to lose their jobs due to systems consolidation.  I did everything that I could to be transparent with the employees that worked for me and I even encouraged them to seek outside opportunities if they were available.
3. Opportunities-Great employees need to have opportunities to grow upward and sideways.  It is important for people to see others getting promoted upward for those who deserve the position.  Also, organizations need to have clear paths to move within the organization.  If there are little opportunities and companies are stagnant, great people are going to leave and look elsewhere.
4. Innovation-Great employees need the ability to innovate and see their recommendations become reality.  It is important that their ideas, not someone else’s get put into practice.  Great leaders will allow their teams the opportunity to innovate and will go to bat in order to ensure those ideas get implemented.  In a previous organization I helped to create a list of 50+ innovative ideas, however when those ideas were presented to executive leadership, they determined none of those ideas were innovative and it squashed the enthusiasm for the entire organization.
5. Benefits-Great employees need great benefits.  It is important to provide good benefits so that great employees are rewarded for their work.  I have see countless great employees leave because benefits deteriorate over time or the company doesn’t evolve to offer new benefits.  I recently had an offer for a job and I turned it down because they were only going to provide 1 week of PTO and that included sick leave.  At my current company I get 20+ days of PTO.

If you are a great boss, please do everything you can to ensure that all your employees have what they need to be successful.

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