The 5 Most Important Factors for Your Employees

“I offered him a generous salary. I don’t understand why he left after just 8 months.”

This leader was puzzled, perplexed, and deflated as he shared during our coaching session. Initially, he was excited he’d hired a sharp, engaged twenty-something. And he was stunned reading the resignation letter. He’d never considered there might be more that motivates employees than a paycheck.

In their book Humans at Work, Anna Tavis and Stela Lupushor found five factors of matters most to employees today:

1.     Thinking about the entire employee lifecycle

2.     Building diversity, equity, and inclusion 

3.      Adapting to new technology

4.      Investing in manager development

5.      Ensuring wellbeing and restoring meaning in work

These may not surprise you, especially since the pandemic, but they’re real – and they aren’t going away. It’s the new way of working, especially among younger people in the workplace – and it’s still shifting.

As Greg Savage wrote,

“Mostly, people don’t change jobs solely for money. They almost never resign on a whim or in a fit of anger. They joined your company because they believed its right for them, and they actually want it to be right. Something, at some point, makes it wrong. And if you really take the time to dig into their real reasons for leaving (and you should) you will find that it’s not ‘the company’ they blame. It’s not the location, or the team, or the database or the air-conditioning… It’s not the company they are leaving; it’s the leadership.”

Lead your people well.