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Do Counter Offers Really Prevent Your Talented Employees from Leaving?

28-11-2019
Employer advice

As a manager, receiving a letter of resignation from a valuable, hardworking employee can feel like a personal failure, not to mention the costs involved in recruiting and on-boarding a new member of staff to replace them. If this is a talented employee that you genuinely don’t want to lose, then it's natural to want to offer them a counter offer in the hopes they will stay. But, do counter offers really work?

The first step following the resignation notice is to find out why they are leaving. This is an important stage in allowing you to determine whether or not the issue can be fixed or not

Some of the most common reasons top employees leave include:

They’re not being challenged enough

Lack of appreciation

Poor management

Feeling undervalued

No room to grow

Understanding why your employee has been actively looking elsewhere is key to determining whether or not a counter offer is worth considering at all. For example, if they feel they are not being challenged enough it is fairly straight forward to assign them additional responsibilities, increase their pay and draw up a personal development plan. Implementing such changes may reassure you that they will stay but the facts state otherwise.

The stats say that around 80% of employees who accept counter-offers leave within six months and a staggering 90% will have left by the twelve-month mark!

According to these figures, offering a counter offer is simply delaying the inevitable. Your employee is still likely to leave you even if you do meet their requests.

While this may sound very doom and gloom, there are two key things to consider that may prevent your talented employees reaching the stage of wanting to resign in the first place.

Implementing open and honest communication channels between managers and their teams. This means that if an employee starts to feel negatively towards things they’ll be able to air their concerns before the issue builds up. By speaking openly, any issues should be able to be resolved quickly whereas leaving them to fester means they’ll become bigger and harder to fix, ultimately leading the employee to seek out employment elsewhere.

Review your salary structure – Feeling undervalued is a commonly cited reason by people who leave their job and is directly related to salary. Make sure you reward your long standing employees and those who take on additional responsibilities by increasing their pay. While it might not be feasible to offer large pay increases and bonuses, work out a strategy that incentivises your loyal employees whether this be a performance based bonus or a loyalty bonus. If your best employees are recognised for their commitment they are less likely to feel underappreciated and instead be motivated to achieve the set bonus.

If you have recently experienced a resignation in your business and are now on the search for a replacement, the team at Perfect Placement would love to help.

We are the UK’s leading Automotive recruitment provider and with over 16 years of experience we are best placed to find you the perfect candidate.

Get in touch with our team to find out more about our specialist services.