Building a team of professionals is difficult — it is a long-term process starting with recruitment, assigning roles according to everyone’s skills and personality, and ongoing training and various team building activities. However, it is even more difficult when you start losing team members and you realize that the hard work has to start again, because key positions in your company are now vacant.
However, employees do not suddenly hand in their resignation. Before that, there is a period when leaders and managers can note a change in their behavior and their interactions with everyone around them. If you are able to spot this change in their behavior, you can prepare to take action. You can either try to retain your employees, by inquiring as to what made them lose their enthusiasm, or you can start the recruitment process early on and have a line-up of qualified candidates ready to take the vacant position.
Here are the top signs that one or several of your employees are ready to quit your company:
1. Disengagement
There is a certain shift in the employee’s attitude in brainstorming sessions and discussions about long-term projects. They become evasive, they no longer commit to such projects and their input is more and more infrequent. It is possible that the respective employee goes through a difficult period (health or personal problems). However, if this goes on for weeks, it is a clear sign that they are slowly withdrawing from the team, in preparation for moving on to another job.
2. A Sudden Change in Wardrobe
Most companies require their employees to wear business attire, but with varied nuances of casualness to allow people to feel relaxed at work. If one of your employees suddenly starts dressing more carefully than usual, although they are not promised a promotion to a higher hierarchy rank, this could mean that they are attending various job interviews.
3. Doing the Minimum Workload
The enthusiastic employee you knew, who always did more than their required tasks, who always gave a helping hand to others and took on more projects than initially assigned, has suddenly reverted to doing the bare minimum specified in the job description.
This sudden decrease in the workload is a sure sign that the employee is no longer motivated to stay in the company and that they are simply waiting for a positive reply to one of their applications to hand in their letter of resignation.
4. Isolation during Lunch Breaks
Lunch break is personal time, but most employees like to socialize, have their meals together, and discuss both work-related and personal issues. When one of them suddenly stops socializing, it could be that they are using this time to discuss job applications over the phone or even to attend interviews. At the same time, the employee becomes more secretive about calls and messages they receive on their personal mobile phone.
5. Complaining
Another top sign that someone is ready to leave the company is the fact that they suddenly start complaining about various issues. In most of the cases, these are minor issues or situations, which the employee had never before complained about. This behavior usually occurs in employees who have special clauses for leaving the company in their employment agreement — they will try to shift the responsibility over to the management in an attempt to become exempt from those special clauses.
These signs will be more or less subtle and accompanied by others, such as leaving the office as soon as the official business hours are over or a total disinterest in getting positive reviews from their direct supervisors and managers. In some situations, these employees can be won back by having an open discussion with them and understanding their dissatisfactions. However, you should also be prepared to start looking for a replacement for the respective employee.
This article was originally published on pldx.org.
