Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Top Ten Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs
By: Gregory P. Smith, author of Here Today Here Tomorrow: Transforming Your Workforce from High-Turnover to High-Retention
There are many reasons why good employees quit, most are preventable. From my years of experience as a consultant, I’ve identified a “Top Ten” list of reasons why people leave jobs:
1. Management demands that one person do the jobs of two or more people, resulting in longer days and weekend work.
2. Management cuts back on administrative help, forcing professional workers to use their time copying, stapling, collating, filing and other clerical duties.
3. Management puts a freeze on raises and promotions, when an employee can easily find a job earning 20-30 percent more somewhere else.
4. Management doesn’t allow the rank and file to make decisions or allow them pride of ownership. A visitor to my website E-mailed me a message that said, “Forget about the “professional” decisions—how about when you can’t even select the company’s holiday card without the President rejecting it for one of his own taste?”
5. Management constantly reorganizes, shuffles people around, and changes direction constantly.
6. Management doesn’t have or take the time to clarify goals and decisions. Therefore, it rejects work after it was completed, damaging the morale and esteem of those who prepared it.
7. Management shows favoritism and gives some workers better offices, trips to conferences, etc.
8. Management relocates the offices to another location, forcing employees to quit or double their commute.
9. Management promotes someone who lacks training and/or necessary experience to supervisor, alienating staff and driving away good employees.
10. Management creates a rigid structure and then allows departments to compete against each other while at the same time preaching teamwork and cooperation.
Interesting, isn’t it — that all ten factors begin with the phrase “Management….” Interesting, too, just how many of these high-turnover factors are preventable? My retention survey confirmed the truth of the saying, “Employees don’t quit their companies, they quit their bosses.” Thirty five percent of the respondents answered yes to the question, Was the attitude of your direct supervisor/manager the primary factor in your quitting a previous job?
Soft management skills—people skills—are the critical element in battling high turnover and creating a high-retention workforce or what I call, “retentionship.”
About the Author
Greg Smith is the “Retention Expert.” He shows executives and business owners how to attract and keep customers and build organizations that retain and motivate its workforce. He is the author of the book, Here Today Here Tomorrow: Transforming Your Workforce from High-Turnover to High-Retention.
Posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 8:58 am and is filed under Employee Relations, Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
20 Comments | “Top Ten Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs”
Greetings Greg,
In my experience as a consultant who decided on full time employment at a large Company, I found that both my input and work were far more likely to be disregarded after I decided on to join the firm. Often in areas where Management had zero experience (IT). Having heard this repeatedly from several others, I wonder what your take on the validity of this might be.
Great article,
Reed Marshal Becker
A good friend of mine has the following tactic: at the start of a new job, he buys a large bottle of Aspirin (TM) and places it on his desk. The pills are consumed as various stress-related headaches require. When the bottle is empty he resigns. He’s made this strategy public in the last couple of places, and has been promoted or given large raises just as the amount of pills in the bottle dropped below some visible threshold (one place explicitly asked him to buy a new bottle of aspirin the day after promotion)
I agree – notice it all starts with “management” and presumes the blame lies at the feet of the people who are tasked with driving the bus? What about the passengers? What about unios seniority issues that force incompetent employees on management, or the incompetent senior employees “bump” junior but perhaps more competent employees? What about employees that arrive with an anti-management attitude and pass this on to others? What about those who are led into administration/management with the same promise of being able to make change, but end up caught in the sandwitch layer between self-centred employees and self-centred executive?
I recently worked at a very small company that sold portable trade show booths and designed custom trade show exhibits (think E3, or Comic-Con). It was a great job, I was learning all kinds of new skills, I liked my fellow employees and my customers. My boss, however, began piling work on me after the first couple months until I was working on three to five exhibit designs at a time. I told him that I was too inexperienced to handle so much at once, and that he should farm out some of the work until I was up to speed.
He refused to do that and was totally surprised when mistakes started showing up in my work. When I reiterated my concerns about my workload he called me “lazy”, “arrogant”, “slow” and “unthinkin”. I quit right on the spot, left, and wrote this resignation letter: http://launemployment.blogspot.com/2006/07/day-1-how-to-quit-job-you-hate.html
great article.
I would like to interview Greg Smith for http://www.educationnews.org
He can click on my name at that web site to see that I am legit
This interview would be done via e-mail at his convenience.
Hope to hear from him soon…
Michael F. Shaughnessy
Amen! When I was job hunting a couple years back, I put together a priority list of what was most important to me in a job. Not surprisingly, having a good boss was #1 on the list. If you think about it, they have the most power to affect the most aspects of your job. I’ve had both great and horrible bosses, and thank heavens I have a great one right now. Leaving my current job never even crosses my mind.
Yeah, and they expect us to read that bullshit book “Who Moved My Cheese”. Those damn rats!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks – this is PERFECT for my first meeting on Tuesday (8-8) with the NEW Site Manager & HR Rep.
My gawd in heaven. You have just listed Wal-Mart’s SOP. They do 1 through 10 in a daily basis.
Lemme guess, you’ve worked there before?
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, and 10 are the reasons I quit my former boss.. He really made it unbearable to work there. A person should not wake up in the morning dreading seeing his boss when that same person always does quality work in an appropriate time frame. On the same note, a person should not feel like they’re on vacation just because the boss is out of the office for the day…
Thank you so much for this insite. I was a victim of at least four of the above metioned issues. Just to let you know that i am from Bahrain and your statements FULLY rectify the current situation of turnovers.
Sad story for good people.
Thanks again,
Faisal
I, too, have recently been confronted by these issues.
When I started working at my company I had a great boss that supported me in every endeavour I chose to take on. He even encouraged me and instructed me to do great things here. Well, they gave him an opportunity to run his own program at the PM level like me and he took that job and the company replaced him with some passive-aggressive jackass. My current “Boss” has systematically tried to take over all decision-making authority that I have and has even gone as far as to instruct me to not contact any of our company’s subcontractors unless he is present. He says that now all requests and communications with our customers must go through him and if he is not present then I am not to contact them.
Fine…I’m going to give him what he wants and look for another job in the meantime. I’m going to send his ass ever damn email I get from my team, the customers, our subcontractors, EVERYONE!! If he wants to handle all of the decisions then fine, I’m gonna flood his ass and watch him get a heart-attack.
Fat smarmy bastard….. >=[
Man, I want to stab him through the back thru his chest!!
I think all of these reasons can be rolled into one, bad managment. If the managment were good enough to see the actions they were taking was forcing people to quit their jobs they should do all they can to help their employees. They need to manage.
I read this article and subsequent response with interest as I am encountering much of what is written about in my job. I have a boss that her decision making leaves me open for a constant barrage of performance slapping. She never acknowledges that she has issued the initial order to do a particular job and then when she gets it from her boss, hangs me out to dry like I am running rogue. It seems that there are competing interests from all department heads and a culture of no interaction, no interdependancy and most of all complete trust permeates the running of our company. There are no conveyed rules about who you can ask for information until you have crossed the line and then you are written up. I am 44 years old and have not cried as much as these past 4 months in all those years. I am interested in finding strategies such as do you keep a log of ongoing issues… so that if and when I leave this job I will be able to demand a good reference.
what a brilliant observation. I am just in the position of being employed in a company with an unusable management. I will supply them with this text once I decide to leave the company. 
))
I am getting ready to quit a nationally known “next-day” carpet installation company. Management encourages each sales rep to work 6 days a week. Appointments are made from people who call in for appointments. Each sales person is given leads based on their sales perfornamce (so they say), even if the sales appointment was a poorly qualified set by the phone center(ex: Can you fix my floor?, Why doesn’t your company carry linoleum?) As the sales rep’s percentage of sales goes down, they are given fewer leads. For the sales rep who has a high closing rate, they are not guaranteed more leads because there may not be very many phone leads to give out. So, you may perform at the top or bottom, there is always a good excuse why you may have only one or two leads a day. There is no cold-calling, so the rest of your day (which is normally a 12-hour working day) is spent sitting in your car waiting for the office to call with appointments. At the end of the day you go home wishing your company would stop over saturating your territory with such a large amount of “commission only” sales reps (which cost the company nothing). The company preaches company loyalty, scolds the reps for not working harder, then refuses to listen to any constructive criticism. Yes, I am ready for a change.
[...] also stumbled across the top 10 reasons employees leave their jobs. Below are at least 6 of the 10 that SEMs have been guilty of [...]
Write us a post on how employees can find good management?
YES!
You are right!
I left the company because of the project manager!
She don’t encourage us at all, on the contrary, she always tells you, you can’t do it, if you did that job I will be surprised!!
See how I am encouraged!
I told her once I want to learn project management and I registered to take a course in it. She told me why do you want to take it? It is not science to learn it, plus you will not succeed in it!
The turnover there is VERY high!
The biggest problem is, she shout all the day!
and she ask us to come to her office and stand up while she shout to us because of a problem she see, and at the end she cries!!