If 80% of your employees were willing to leave your company for just one thing, you’d want to know what it is, right? Even more, you’d want to know what you can do about it, too.
I’ll cut to the chase. That one thing? It’s development.
According to the ExecuSearch staffing agency, more than four-fifths of employees would leave their jobs if offered better development opportunities elsewhere. Your top talent especially craves opportunities to grow.
In a competitive talent market, lagging behind on employee development can leave your company struggling, especially when your best employees decide to jump ship in search of increased growth opportunities. Keep reading to learn what you can do about it.
Disillusioned by (lack of) development
It may not surprise you to know that according to Gallup, 87% of millennials consider growth and development opportunities important to them in their jobs. It’s not just millennials, though – 69% of workers of other generations agree.
They want opportunities to grow and develop in their careers. However, they’re not always getting that need filled; only 50% feel their employers provide those opportunities, according to the American Psychological Association Center for Organizational Excellence.
And as we’ve seen earlier, if they can’t find those opportunities at your workplace, they’re liable to seek them somewhere else. Don’t let that be the case at your company.
Year-round employee growth
What’s the flip side of employees leaving over too few development opportunities? Retention. They often will stay if they get what they need and feel they’re advancing.
Fortunately, a couple things you can do throughout the year will help: performance reviews and surveys.
Performance reviews are especially effective when you conduct them more than once a year – quarterly reviews, for example, give your managers and their direct reports the opportunity to build development goals and follow up on them more proactively than an annual cycle allows.
Use those more-frequent reviews to touch base on long-term development goals so employees know their growth matters. This also prevents that rush to complete forgotten goals in the month before their annual review!
Surveys can also help you ensure you’re developing employees in the ways they find meaningful. This is especially helpful when it comes to your top employees. Use surveys to identify their needs and wants regarding training, so you can offer the resources most likely to help them stick around.
Your highest-performing employees are the most challenging – and most expensive – to replace, so making sure to match their ambitions with the development they crave will help you hang on to them.
Not just a shiny perk
Prioritizing employee development can strengthen your employer brand, but it’s more than a nice-to-have recruitment tool. Employees who feel their employer supports their growth tend to be more loyal and more engaged. You’ll see higher morale and performance, and all that contributes to increased retention.