Keep Employes From Leaving by Understanding Their True Motives

Watching employees come and go is just part of corporate life, but there are special situations that may prompt your intervention. What is the best way to handle an unwanted employee resignation, you may wonder? By using a little tact, skillful communication and a good measure of common sense. 

The first crucial step in convincing employees to stay is to determine exactly why they’re trying to leave, so you can then propose to fix those issues if possible or somehow update your terms in a way that will change their mind. This is a little trickier than it sounds since it involves getting to the core of their actual motivations. 

Do not take it personally, avoid making assumptions

Sometimes employee resignations can be much unexpected and often they will lead to a host of misunderstandings and frustrations that could spread across the workspace causing all kinds of sour repercussions and ugly emotional outbursts. 

Keeping that in mind, you must make a conscious effort to keep a cool and objective head and not allowing things to get personal at all. If you want to keep a worker on board, the first step is to understand why they’re trying to go. 

Sometimes they’ll just want to change careers or cities – in that case there’s little you can do to change their minds. But other times – most of the times, actually – employees will just try to leave because they’re unhappy with minor office related aspects that you, as a manager, can control and adjust. 
 

Establish safe communication and set your terms

If you’re earnestly looking to keep an employee from resigning, you must start by creating a safe space for communication. 

You have to get that person to truthfully express what is causing them to leave, so you can then decide if you can get them to stay by making adjustments to their current contract. Do not assume that people will just tell you what’s bothering them freely, because most of the time they will be encumbered about it or shy or simply afraid of your reaction.