What are the telltale signs of employees who want to leave, and is it possible to change their minds about it? Senior HR professionals share their observations with Lee Xieli.
■ Jimmy Png
HR director
One°15 Marina Club
There are so many ways to find out [if employees are planning to leave]. They take additional days, change their off days or they will take leave and they won’t tell you very much.
Sometimes people would talk. This person would tell someone or their best friend at work and that someone would go tell another person so you will come to know about it. Those who want to leave or those who ask for an increment or a promotion will talk about it. You look at the newspapers at the same time to see which competitor is advertising, put two and two together and hopefully you’ll get some ideas.
What’s important is if you know about it now, you can’t do anything about it. If you want people to stay you have to build many factors over time and money should not be the only thing. Also, don’t [blacklist] them. In fact, we should treat them well and if they go somewhere else, we want them to have good things to say about the company.
Usually, for key personnel whom we want to keep, we ask their managers to have coffee with the person and zoom in on this [the possibility of leaving], get details about the new job and the work, assure them of their prospects in the company and let then know that if they were to leave, it can jeopardise the company.
■ Liu Fang Joo
Senior VP of group HR and corporate communications
NatSteel Holdings
You’ll know when people only work on certain projects up to a certain time and they are not thinking forward. It’s very clear when employees start to take less of an interest in their work. Some people are very blatant about this.
Also, at certain times of the year, for example usually after bonus [payouts], these are the times when people think about leaving and would want to look for a job. Some are open about it in the sense they tell their bosses early that they will probably leave in a few months time. It’s usually for personal reasons such as shifting overseas.
If you want to retain these employees, talk to them. Every manager has to know their own staff well to know [the telltale signs]. There are no hard and fast rules. When you do appraisals and you don’t know what the staff is doing or you can’t sense it, then it’s difficult to tell.
There’s no way [to retain the employee] if he or she wants to leave. We don’t believe in making a counter-offer because money can never be the only factor that retains the person. At the end of the day, the exit interview is to help us understand what factors are lacking.
■ Goh Ai Lin
Corporate development manager
Lawton & Yeo Design Associates
Telltale signs of employees who intend to leave the company could be openly complaining and grumbling about the amount of work, unhappiness about remuneration or behaving strangely when receiving a phone call. Other common observations include taking sudden urgent half-day leaves, lacking enthusiasm in their job, displaying an indifferent attitude and being disengaged.
However, there are signs which one may not read too much into as they hard to distinguish from a poor work attitude, such as rejecting extra work or responsibility, making excuses not to work overtime, not keen about training or upgrading oneself and being unwilling to share expertise or train others. So it is important that HR should not be overly reactive to actions that may come off as intent to leave the organisation.
The trick to distinguishing between the two is to see whether this behaviour is a sudden change from the worker’s previous behaviour.
When an employee shows signs of wanting to quit, usually this person will leave as the heart is no longer where it is supposed to be. Thus, it is important for any HR practitioner to be proactive in engaging employees constantly and to identify trouble spots before the situation escalates to a “no turning back” state.
