As an entrepreneur, your team is likely pretty small and tight-knit, which means having someone leave the team can be a significant challenge. However, turnover is inevitable, and learning to manage it successfully makes you a better business owner.
While you hate to see someone leave, a departure offers the opportunity to think about the roles on your team and make adjustments that can improve the work environment, culture, and your business’s overall success.
Here’s how to make the most of this change while ensuring a smooth transition.
Understand Why They’re Leaving
Sometimes an employee leaves because of a life change that causes them to move, a return to school, or a transition of some kind. As a result, they’re no longer available to work for your organization.
On the other hand, maybe there wasn’t an unavoidable reason. Perhaps the employee was upset with their work or the company culture, or maybe another company was able to offer them a better opportunity.
Either way, exploring the “why” of the separation can help you see potential concerns with workload, professional communication, or company culture that you can correct to keep your company strong.
Conduct an Exit Interview
Once you know why the employee has decided to leave, it’s time to get more information about how feel about your organization, the work they did, and the culture. You can find this out by conducting an exit interview.
There are key questions you don’t want to miss, such as finding out where your employee thinks the company can improve, what their relationship with their supervisor was like, and how well the company helped them achieve their professional goals. Be sure to ask follow-up questions to understand their answers better.
At the same time, there are questions to avoid because they don’t help you improve the company. For example, don’t ask about specific conflicts, personal issues, or their opinion of other employees’ work.
The goal of the exit interview is a chance to gain information about your company’s organizational issues, HR concerns, work management, and leadership styles that you can use to better retain employees in the future.
Review Job Responsibilities and Make Adjustments
The next step is to reevaluate the positions in your organization to ensure that everyone has a clear job description and equitable workload. Don’t simply rehire for what your former employee was doing — instead, make sure that work is still necessary and find out if any other adjustments need to be made to workloads and responsibilities.
Once you’ve decided exactly what you need to hire for, create a clear job description and get ready to attract ideal candidates to your open position. Some ways to attract top talent include having a strong brand, an easy-to-understand job description, and a strong recruitment process.
Make Sure Compensation and Benefits Are Competitive
To incentivize your current employees who may have to pick up some of the fallen workload from the leaving employee or attract anyone as a replacement, you’ll need to review your compensation terms. You can do this by reviewing the market salaries within your industry and offering competitive compensation.
Also, take a look at your company benefits. Are they in line with the best employee benefits offered by others?
Some of the most important benefits to employees include retirement account matching, excellent healthcare benefits, flexible scheduling, flexibility with time off, tuition reimbursement, and perks like free gym memberships and access to employee assistance programs, mindfulness training, and other wellness benefits.
Having competitive compensation and excellent benefits allows you to attract top talent to your company and retain the high-quality employees you currently have.
Hire as Quickly as Reasonably Possible
The final step is to move quickly in the hiring process. Having a missing team member is stressful for your remaining staff, and you don’t want people doing extra work for very long. If you drag your feet, you may lose additional team members.
Also, competing for top talent means making quick offers before someone else does, so having an efficient hiring process is essential. However, it should also be effective at screening candidates to find the person with the right skills who fits with your culture.
Once you’ve hired someone, a clear onboarding process helps bond them to the company and allows them to get on their feet in their new role quickly. This helps make the transition smooth and minimizes the strain on the rest of your team.
Make the Most of a Departing Employee
Having someone leave your team is tough, but it’s a great opportunity to understand more about how employees experience your company and make changes if necessary. Once you do, it’s vital to hire quickly and onboard effectively to ensure a smooth transition with minimal disruption.
The improvements you make can help ensure your employees are happy and productive and don’t want to leave your organization for quite some time!