Why Employees Leave - Employees & Employers Don't Agree on Reasons

The landscape of employee retention is shifting, and employers are falling behind the curve in understanding the top reasons employees leave, according to the 2007/08 Global Strategic Rewards Study by Watson Wyatt Worldwide. 

Findings from global surveys of 946 companies and 13,000 employees show that while workers rank stress the top reason they would leave their organization, stress is not even among the top five reasons cited by employers.  Base pay is cited as the #1 reason by employers, but comes second to stress levels for employees surveyed.

The top five ranked reasons from the study as to why employees leave organizations, from employee as well as employer viewpoints, are highlighted in the table below.

Employees, particularly those in our emerging workforce, tell us that money is important - and I guess the above findings would suggest that we're hearing this.  The danger is in employers believing that its the only important thing - or that enough of it will compensate for a stressful, unhealthy work environment.  The results of this study would suggest that those organizations willing to take steps to mitigate the toll of today's high demands and frantic pace of business on their staff may be the ultimate winners in the retention wars.

Comments

[Wally Bock]

I think we need to dig deeper on the stress issue. There are lots of things that can cause stress, among them the expectation that a person is "on call" all the time, being asked to achieve results without adequate resources, etc. But one constant is that lousy bosses cause stress. I've seen teams in the same company, with the same stressors, with very different morale and very different feel. The difference was the team leader.

[Ann Bares]

Wally:

Agreed! Supervisors have a lot of potential influence over the work lives of their subordinates - and the lousy ones are definitely stressors.

Thanks for the comment!

[Raychung22]

Another study on similar disconnect between employer and employee at Ryan Johnson's blog
http://www.worldatwork.org/waw/Content/blogs/html/rjarchive_Q4_07/rjblog_10-10-07.html

[AHRE]

They actually seem fairly close. Since a lot of stress comes from a bad relationship with a manager...

I'd say about 4.5/5 are in line on the top 5. That's better than I'd have expected.

[Ann Bares]

AHRE:

There is a degree of alignment, if we assume that the employers believe - as we do - that managers can be a significant source (or mitigator) of job stress. I thought the biggest disconnect was the importance that employers put on base pay (52% rank as top reason) compared to employees (33% rank as top reason).

Thanks for reading and commenting!