Why Do Employees Stay With Their Employers?

Friday, October 07, 2011

A great deal of money, time, and energy is spent on determining why employees leave their employers. But the simple and obvious reason is, because they can! Even in difficult economic times, top organizational talent, can and often does leave for perceived greener pastures. Would it not make more sense to determine why employees stay and focus that same money, time, and energy to determine whatever makes employees stay? One focus of why employees stay with their current employers can be found in the concept of “job embeddeddness”.

Job embeddeddness, a concept founded in the disciplines of applied and industrial psychology and encompasses those aspects of employment which keep an employee affiliated with their current organization. Yes, it certainly includes tangible aspects such as compensation and benefits but also includes co-worker relations, supervisor-employee relationships, the work itself, the public image of the organization, the community in which they live, and even the daily commuting requirements. Job embeddeddness, may be defined as “a web of forces that cause one to feel he or she would not leave a job”. The concept has similarities to the marketing notion of consumer “brand loyalty”. Thus job embeddeddness is a predictor of the likely hood that an employee will stay vs. leave an employer.

Wendy Harman, the lead author of a 2007 study on voluntary turnover stated, "As we head into an era of the largest brain drain the world has ever experienced, that of the baby boomers leaving the workforce, it is going to become increasingly important for organizations to be able to keep their best workers. Turnover is extremely expensive for organizations and becomes even more so the more an organization increases the amount of training time and money it invests in its employees. Knowing how to retain these employees creates a less costly, more stable work and community environment."

The work environment, whether an office, factory floor or classroom, is a social environment in which most of us spend one third to one half of our day. Even in today’s business world of multiple jobs and career changes throughout our lifetime, workers may invest several years with any single employer. Relationships developed at work often go on to continue well after employees separate from their current employers. Recognizing that these social relationships exist within the workplace is one means of building and reinforcing job embeddeddness.

While during a period of high unemployment, employers may ignore voluntary turnover or even consider it to be good for the organization, business cycles changes. Furthermore, if it is the organization’s top talent that is leaving, organizations will want to reconsider their lack of concern. Lastly, an organization’s community image may affect its ability operate within the external environment when it comes time to build or expand a mill or plant. Thus, employers who are known for their disregard of employee relationships may still find it difficult to attract a disable workforce even in these times of high unemployment.

As employers, we cannot necessarily design jobs around the unique social environment of each and every employee. Nevertheless, we can provide jobs with a high degree of flexibility as a means to encourage job embeddeddness and increase retention of our top talent. Furthermore, we can educate our organizational leaders in those features of job embeddeddness which strengthen the employee’s bonding to and affinitive for our organization.