Carly Guthrie saw people join and leave companies for over 15 years. As a top talent recruiter in the San Francisco Bay Area, she dedicating most of her time to finding the best candidates for tech startups. Earlier this month she gave an interview to First Round Review and talked about why people leave companies and what employers could do to improve retention.
She says there are many practices communicating that the company doesn’t really care about employees as people. That is what makes people leave. The talented staff starts thinking about leaving after the company shows little or no respect for their personal lives.
Time is precious for employees too, not only for CEOs and company founders.
Guthrie isn’t the only one to reach that conclusion. 1 in 4 employees experiences high levels of conflict between work and family life. A spouse is stressed by an employee’s job just as they are. A study even found that working for a bad boss can double an employee’s risk of a heart attack.
According to another study, two-thirds of employees feel overwhelmed. They also feel underpaid, burned out, and generally unsatisfied. Employees feel the same way regardless of their industry.
If a bad hire wants to leave your company, you might even see it as a blessing in disguise because you won’t have to fire them, but when the ones thinking about leaving are your superstars, you need to take action.
What most HR experts recommend are employee reward programs and non-cash perks. They also emphasise the need to improve communication between top management and staff. Another important aspect that can increase job satisfaction and retention is flexibility. People what to be able to be 100% both at work and in their personal lives and that means juggling work hours and home hours, swapping one for the other, taking work home, and working during the weekend.
One other solution is to lighten the workload of top employees by hiring dedicated remote assistants. The remote assistants can perform all the mundane tasks that are eating up your superstars’ time. That way your top employees can focus on creating their best work, helping your company deliver better services and products.
A Philippine-based remote assistant, who has a college degree and is a native English speaker can handle a big part of your top employees’ tasks, allowing them to focus on your core business. A remote assistant costs only around $6 per hour, so it’s much cheaper to hire a few remote assistants to support your top employees than to hire another top employee.
An indirect benefit is that top employees feel highly appreciated – their employer offered them the much-needed support they hoped for.
