Companies having a problem holding on to good employees might want to consider those employees are burning out.
That's according to a study from Kronos Incorporated and Future Workplace, which says burnout is the biggest threat to building an engaged workforce in 2017. The study, the most recent in the Employee Engagement Series, finds 95 percent of human resource executives not only chalk up the problem with employee retention to burnout, but don't believe a solution will be found in the near future.
While 87 percent of respondents say increasing retention was a crucial priority, they also cite plenty of obstacles to resolve the problem. Close to half (46 percent) say burnout was responsible for 20 percent to 50 percent of the turnover in their organizations, and close to 10 percent say it causes more than 50 percent of workforce turnover each year.
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They also identified unfair compensation (41 percent), unreasonable workloads (32 percent), and too much overtime or after-hours work (32 percent) as the three biggest contributors to the problem.
In addition, the top obstacles to fixing burnout are too many competing priorities (20 percent), outdated HR technology (20 percent), a lack of executive support (14 percent) and a lack of organizational vision (13 percent).
Other problems identified by HR leaders as contributing to burnout are in the categories of talent management, employee development and leadership — all issues they say should be under their control.
They include poor management (30 percent), employees seeing no clear connection of their role to corporate strategy (29 percent) and a negative workplace culture (26 percent).
Budget issues are major contributors to burnout, according to the HR folks: 16 percent say a lack of budget is the primary obstacle to improving employee retention in the next 12 months; 15 percent say a lack of funding is the biggest challenge to improving employee engagement; and 27 percent say funding is the biggest hurdle to implementing new HR-related technology, such as tools that would reduce manual or administrative work to act more strategically.
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