Having a Performance Review When Leaving the Job

​Editor's Notation: SHRM has partnered with Harvard Business Review to bring you relevant articles on key 60 minutes topics and strategies. In this commodity, the authors outline how HR and management tin can spot when an employee is considering leaving the system.

Despite a century of speculation by managers and scholars, we know very little near whether certain cues or signs exhibited by employees can predict whether they're about to quit.

To assist managers and companies identify employees at take chances of quitting, we investigated this very question and uncovered a set of behavioral changes exhibited by employees—what we dub pre-quitting behaviors—that are stiff predictors of voluntary quits in the 12 months after they are observed by managers. Our inquiry was inspired by a study by evolutionary psychologists David Kiss and Todd Shackelford showing that romantic partners give off cues that signal whether they are committing infidelity. A series of classic studies by psychologist John Gottman supports this, identifying how sure verbal and nonverbal cues expressed by married couples during brief videotaped interactions can forecast their eventual divorce.

But the romantic realm isn't the just place where cues tin can accept identify. Poker players give off "tells" that reveal the force of their easily, while American football players read their rivals' behaviors to decide how they volition act after the ball is snapped. And inquiry shows that criminals have become savvy at identifying informants or undercover officers in their midst.

To understand how tells might play out in the workplace, we first sought to identify a large gear up of behavioral changes employees exhibit that indicate their futurity turnover. We asked nearly 100 managers to reply the post-obit question: Retrieve for a moment of the peers and subordinates who have voluntarily quit your organization in the last two years. How was their beliefs dissimilar in the months prior quitting that might have told you they were on their way out? We as well asked 100 employees to describe their ain changes in behavior before leaving a previous task. These inquiries yielded over 900 unlike pre-quitting behaviors. The survey respondents reported relatively odd behavioral changes (e.yard., "stopped caring about their personal advent;" "became aggressive toward other employees") also as many common ones (e.yard., "less willingness to volunteer for special projects;" "decreased attendance at staff meetings").

For the side by side phase of the enquiry, we edited and pruned the list of 900+ behaviors into a structured 116-detail questionnaire. Nosotros administered this provisional survey to three additional samples of managers. The first set of managers rated how frequently previous leavers enacted these behaviors earlier quitting. One-half of the 116 behaviors were eliminated because they occurred infrequently (eastward.grand., "They asked co-workers for contacts at other companies;" "They exhibited sudden and frequent changes in their mood"). We then circulated this reduced survey to some other grouping of managers who rated how often their current subordinates exhibit these actions. We side by side analyzed these ratings and isolated a cluster of xiii highly correlated behaviors that best represent employees' proclivity toward virtually-future voluntary turnover. Finally, we double-checked this finding by request ane more group of managers to describe their employees' behaviors with the last xiii-item survey.

The pre-quitting behaviors that made the cut are beneath:

1. Their work productivity has decreased more than usual.
2. They accept acted less similar a team player than usual.
3. They have been doing the minimum amount of work more frequently than usual.
4. They take been less interested in pleasing their manager than usual.
5. They accept been less willing to commit to long-term timelines than usual.
6. They have exhibited a negative change in attitude.
7. They have exhibited less effort and piece of work motivation than usual.
8. They accept exhibited less focus on job related matters than usual.
9. They take expressed dissatisfaction with their current job more frequently than usual.
10. They accept expressed dissatisfaction with their supervisor more frequently than usual.
11. They have left early from work more than frequently than usual.
12. They take lost enthusiasm for the mission of the organization.
13. They have shown less interest in working with customers than usual.

The about interesting take-away from this second phase of our research were the behaviors that did not survive our screening process. Annotation that the 13 key behaviors do non include "wearing dressier clothes to work," "leaving a resume on the printer," or "missing work for doctors' appointments more frequently than usual."  These and many similar behaviors, which accept entered into managers' sociology of primal signs of impending departure, were rarely observed or did not statistically hang together with the core behaviors representing a general predilection to quit. Such behaviors may predict future turnover, but not equally consistently equally the 13 core pre-quitting behaviors across a wide range of jobs, industries, and geographies.

In our final study, we investigated how accurately the thirteen core pre-quitting behaviors predicted hereafter voluntary turnover. In January and February of 2014, we asked a large sample of managers, all employed with different companies, to use the 13-item survey to draw contempo behavioral changes past a randomly selected subordinate. So, 12 months later nosotros contacted the managers again to see if these employees were still employed or had voluntarily quit. Later statistically decision-making for various employee attributes that might predict futurity turnover (age, tenure, education, etc.), likewise as managers' personal expectations of whether or not the employee would quit in the adjacent 12 months, our calibration even so predicted an employee'south voluntary turnover. The more an employee exhibited the 13 pre-quitting behaviors, the more likely she was to quit.

More than specifically, when they rated an employee based on each behavior (1 = strongly disagree; 2 = disagree; three = neither agree nor disagree; iv = agree; 5 = strongly concur), those with an average score of 4.2 or higher had an expected probability of turnover two times the typical employee. Other factors can affect whether someone leaves an organization, of form, just a score this high suggests the risk of turnover is loftier enough to warrant attending.

The next logical question is what you should do when someone yous manage is exhibiting these behaviors—or how you should recollect about them if you yourself are looking for some other task.

For managers, our advice is to focus on retaining star employees in the short-term. Typically, organizations handle a turnover problem with big scale interventions to improve departmental or business firm-level commitment, job satisfaction, and job engagement. These strategies may piece of work, only they take fourth dimension to design and implement. Thinking in terms of the turnover gamble of specific employees allows you to invest your fourth dimension and resources into those employees who create the near value and are really at take chances of leaving.

At that place are many means to invest in employees you fear may be looking: pay increases, promotions, special projects, etc.  One technique is to utilize what are called "stay interviews."  Instead of conducting only exit interviews to larn what caused good employees to quit, concord regular one-on-1 interviews with current high-performing employees to learn what keeps them working in your organisation and what could be changed to keep them from straying.

It's besides worth noting that employees in the midst of leaving oftentimes have customers or proprietary production information with them. And every bit most of the states know, a quick difference can exit a hole in company operations that creates long term harm. While it'south important to realize that there is no guarantee that employees exhibiting pre-quitting behaviors will definitely go out, those identified as flight risks should be monitored for unsavory behavior. Succession planning for their departure may prevent damages arising from unexpected quits.

And if you're in the market place for a new job? Hiding your own pre-quitting behaviors may show difficult. Given the negative consequences of turnover, know that your managers and peers are likely watching for obvious and subtle changes in behavior—and that no single action is a expressionless giveaway. Instead, patterns of behavior over time that may seem subtle to you might tip off your boss. We advise that you stay engaged with your work, keep to show enthusiasm for the mission of the organization, and project a consistent level of relational energy to the members of your work team.

The basic tenet of managing turnover is that everyone eventually leaves. But the "when" can experience like a mystery. While our research shouldn't be considered the only way to identify an employee on the verge of quitting, it does signal to a set of behaviors that, taken together, can provide a clue—and it discounts behaviors that accept mistakenly been seen as tells. So the next time you have an inkling about whether someone is well-nigh to exit, know that you lot may be onto something when yous take the correct indicators into account. Every bit Dolly Parton sang, "Though y'all haven't left me yet, I know you lot're just every bit adept as gone."

Timothy M. Gardner is an Associate Professor of Management at the Jon M. Huntsman Schoolhouse of Business concern at Utah State Academy.

Peter W. Hom is a Professor of Direction at the Westward. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University

zelayajact1969.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/signs-that-someone-is-about-to-quit.aspx

Share this post