The Causes of Employee Turnover

The most common cause of employee turnover is probably not what you think.

Many different reasons have been given for employee turnover:  personality issues, an unchallenging work environment, insufficient employee pay and benefits, poor management, work stress and more.  Yes, these issues can lead to turnover, but you’ll rarely find the most important one identified:  no or poor employee training.

No or poor employee training has more organizational symptoms than you could imagine, and they are all costing you a lot of money.

Your employee turnover rate is directly affected by your training. Why is that? Well, according to a study done by the ASTD in 2003, 41% of employees at companies with poor training planned on leaving within a year vs. 12% planned departures at companies with excellent training.

But why does employee training have such a significant effect on turnover rates? Well, bad training leaves an employee with inadequate knowledge and skills to do the job. He feels uncertain and confused. Management slams him for his incompetence. He’ll either work it out as he goes or he won’t, and he’ll give up.

This is particularly true with traditionally high-turnover jobs such as sales and customer service. Second-rate employee training in these areas will blow your human error and turnover costs out the roof.

This has been conclusively proven through countless studies. How much money do fumbling salespeople and customer service representatives cost you? You have to pay them for their time and then you suffer from their mistakes–lost sales, wasted opportunities, unnecessary escalations, lost customers and so on.

Simply having “employee training” Is not enough. You need to have employee training that works, and unfortunately most training techniques don’t work.

This statement might seem arrogant, but it’s true. We have worked with small businesses that have one person trying to assemble training programs and global corporations with an entire team of training researchers and managers, and the problem has always been identical:  their training falls short of the expectations.  Simply put, it doesn’t work.

What does that mean, though? The programs “don’t work.” It’s very simple. They’re slow, they don’t teach all the essential data, they don’t result in 100% proficiency and they aren’t generally liked by the staff. What they do result in is a work force that is confused and unstable, that needs a lot of on-the-job training and that makes a lot of mistakes…factors that waste substantial amounts of money.

The real cost of poor or no employee training–the cost of incompetence, inefficiency and human error–is disturbing.

You aren’t alone in your training and employee retention woes. To be honest, the employee training industry is full of costly, impracticable “solutions” that give little to no ROI.

At Accelerated Training Solutions, we are different. I know, everybody says that, but listen to this. We didn’t just concoct a new training method and say it’s the best. We took every training system we could find, trashed the obviously unworkable parts and started testing the rest. We did this for two years and we discovered the key training elements that work. We use only those elements when making our training programs and, what do you know, our programs work!

And best of all, they’re brutally simple. Ingenious, but simple. Einstein once said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” This is very applicable to employee training. We know that one of the most important parts of building workable training programs is the ability to make the complex simple and understandable. We have become experts at this and have a range of training tools that we use to accomplish this. One of the best tools is drilling.

Don’t take my word for it though. I want to show you, in detail, our training method and if its workability, and dare I say ingenuity, isn’t immediately obvious to you, then that’s my loss.

Enter your name and email address below and we will e-mail you a link to download our free eBook on employee training. This eBook will show you exactly why our unbelievable training system is changing the face of employee training and we will give you tools that you can immediately use to increase your productivity and reduce your turnover.