Peakon, an employee engagement platform, performed a study from over 11 million survey comments and published a report that highlighted why employees may seek employment elsewhere. Below are the top-3 highlights from this report.

3- Workplace environment:

Peakon’s study found that the one of the top ranked response to the question, “If you had a magic wand, what's the one thing you would change about [your organization]?”, was that employees would most like to change the office environment in which they work.

This insight was reinforced from other two other industry surveys:
FelxJobs survey of over 3000 employees identified that less than 10% employees prefer the office.
Upwork Future workforce report from 2018 identified that 75% of employees reported higher productivity levels when working from home.
The research is indicative of a preference that is generational agnostic. Employees are more engaged and productive in an environment that offers flexibility, both in terms of location and work arrangements. 

2- Management's role in employee retention:

To understand the employee feedback to management responses, Peakon dissected the data across different industries, to identify the common red thread. 

The results showed that even in most responsive sectors like Government, management responses were received only 33% of the time, while in low touch industries like transportation, the feedback responses were less than 10%.

A Udemy report in 2018 found that 50% of employees quit due to bad managers and 75% suggested that their managers lacked proper people management training. 

Management’s key role is to provide clarity to the employees, which is based on a trust driven relationship. 

1- Impact of communication on employee performance: 

Peakon found that the top ranked lever in employee retention is communication. Whilst this may seem as the easiest of all fixes, it may also turn out to be the most difficult. 
A study by Dynamic Signal of over a 1,000 U.S. employees found that nearly 75% considered quitting due to lack of workplace communication.
Communication is key to ensuring transparency and sense of belonging, which in turn can lead to higher levels of engagement, productivity and therefore, profitability. 

Key Takeaways for management to retain top talent:
  • Actively listen to your employees and make sure they feel heard.
  • Engage them to become part of the conversation and collectively own the outcome.
  • Create an environment built on trust, to increase the level the belonging.