Newsflash: Compensation #1 Reason for Employee Turnover
The raging capitalists at Salary.com boldly declared “compensation is the number one reason for job turnover,” following their most recent survey. The top turn-over causes read like a who’s who of our Wednesday staff meetings:
- inadequate compensation
- lack of career development/advancement
- insufficient recognition
- boredom
The report cites a third of workers as wanting a 16-30% raise to jump ship. This caught my eye following a recent convo with a colleague overseeing outsourced employees in Singapore. He said, only minimally exaggerating: “the turn-over is unreal. These guys will leave for a couple dollars. $400 or $500/yr is all it takes to steal away a technician. I don’t even bother getting to know them anymore.”
It’s just one of those globalization ponderables… a raise I wouldn’t fill out new HR forms for can meaningfully improve a foreign colleague’s quality of life, and unbalance the corporate culture such that we treat them even more like commodities.
