I am going to be on vacation for the next couple weeks. As is my practice, I will be featuring some of the more interesting/thought providing posts from my archives while I am away.
At the risk of making my employer worry that I am not coming back, I wanted to draw attention to an entry I wrote nearly a decade ago about why people leave their jobs.
In that entry I quoted an article by Matthew Kelly where he noted,
“The #1 reason people leave a job is not because they have a dysfunctional relationship with their manager or because they don’t feel appreciated. They leave because they cannot see the connection between the work they are doing today and the future they imagine for themselves.
When employees believe that what they are doing is helping them to accomplish their personal dreams they can tolerate quite a bit. I am not saying that they should, but they can. Without some understanding of the connection between their daily work and their future, employees will leave for the most trivial reasons”
This sentiment is more commonly acknowledged as motivator now than it was back then. In addition to talking about what motivates people to stay or leave, Kelly also lists the costs of employee turnover which include recruitment, training, lost business and productivity.