Photo Credit HR Insider

Actual Comments of Why Employees Leave

“There are so many managers assigned to a person it is difficult to know who is really your manager.”

The Solution:

Too many managers. Some organizations—whether through a series of acquisitions or an outdated strategy or other reason—become top-heavy, making the employees in the trenches feel over-managed.

The quote above from the exiting employee suggests that he/she was over managed to the point of not knowing who was actually, truly in charge.

Over management can also happen in leaner companies where a section of the organizational chart is a little out of whack, or where certain boundary-spanning employees, due to the nature of their jobs, have their toes in multiple departments and receive direction from multiple managers inside the company.

Another possibility is that there are not “too many managers” but rather, not proper delineation between the managers. Their “territories” are not clearly defined, and so they provide management and/or give assignments or direction to a range of employees. In turn, these employees receive marching orders with different needs/agendas/expectations, some of which might even compete or be at odds with one another, or might be unrealistic given the worker’s commitments to time-intensive projects assigned by a different manager.

In general, employees prefer to report to a single person who knows them, their workload, their strengths, weaknesses, preferences and schedule.

Taking this feedback into consideration, it’s important to ascertain what the precise problem is surrounding the position or department at your company. Or provide management with your best guesses.

The solution might be as simple as making it more clear upon hiring for the position who they report to, above all others.

Or to make sure that it makes sense for the position to report to who they currently are. Would it make more sense for the position to report to someone lower on the hierarchy? Someone who has more proximity to the position and more bandwidth to effectively manage them?

Simple changes here could be highly effective.

(This blog post is brought to you by HSD Metrics, an exit interview company that helps companies reduce employee turnover by providing automated reference checking, exit interviews, and by measuring employee retention. The comments from exiting employees that are featured in this blog are collected from actual exit interviews conducted using ExitRight®, HSD Metrics’ exit interviewing service. If you are interested in learning more, contact us today. Because we place the privacy of our clients at the top of our priority list; the names of all involved parties are kept completely confidential.)