by The Green Fairy

Created on: March 11, 2009

High staff turnover can occur for many reasons. What constitutes high turnover differs across industries; it is always going to higher in retail catering when compared to banking, because a high percentage of staff in coffee shops and restaurants are students or travellers, taking short-term positions in order to earn before moving on. But even a retail catering environment can have a staff turnover higher than the industry average.

Having spent twenty years in various businesses I've identified a number of causes of high staff turnover.

1. Poor training. There is nothing more demotivating than being asked to do a job and not being given adequate training. Some people have the ability to pick it up quickly, but they are the exception. I've seen it happen over and over again, even when there are good intentions.The value of training continues to be ignored by most managers.

2. Weak team leadership. Even if someone has been trained to do a specific job, they are usually working as part of team.They are alongside people with complementary roles, who together deliver a process or solution. It might be an accounting department or a team running a coffee shop - the principle is the same.If team lack strong leadership they will not function well, which will lead to disagreements and relationship breakdown.

3. Paying too little. In every industry there are the top payers, and the bottom payers. But right down at the bottom there are unscrupulous employers who want to pay the least they have to.High staff turnover is inevitable.

4. Unreasonable expectations. Every now and again I come across organisations or managers who seem to think that their staff should be doing more than they are paid for. They expect that employees will work longer hours and give up their breaks to get the job done, usually without any from of reward or positive feedback.

5. A culture of high turnover.This is normally a result of one of the previous issues. An organisation learns to live with high turnover because it has become 'normal' for them. New employees soon pick up and this and learn that they can expect to be moving on perhaps sooner than they thought, and so it becomes self-perpetuating.

During a time of high unemployment and financial uncertainly staff turnover will drop as people are worried about their jobs and find it more difficult to get another one.However, this masks the problem of high turnover, and when the economy picks up these organisations will struggle as a large proportion of their workforce move on almost simultaneously.

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