5 Missed Opportunities

1. Not valuing your staff enough: One of my pet peeves is companies letting hardworking and skilled staff walk out and, in the worst case, right into competitor’s arms. I still can’t understand why the standard response to that seems to be indifference, and thinking that is how life goes. Yes,sometimes change is inevitable, and not everyone is meant to work for the same company their entire lives anymore, but there is a big difference between needing change and leaving for a reason. When someone leaves because they are not valued where they are, that is an unnecessary loss for the company that has spent time and money on them. Why does anyone want to benefit the competitor with that? When someone with experience walks out, they will take with them knowledge about past mistakes, knowledge about customer behaviour and preferences, understanding of previous technical issues and their reasons, etc. The loss of that information comes with a cost, even when it is not immediately measurable. The biggest cost of it will be if they use any of that knowledge for the competitor’s benefit. Why have a clause in the contract to try to prevent that when you could motivate and value your staff so much that they won’t want to leave? Unless you do your best to make sure all the experience gained will be passed on properly to the successor, you are making a big donation to your competitor.

2. Not allowing your staff to use their skills: Another needless reason for leaving for competition is to use skills people are not able to use in their current role, while the company is looking for extra skills from outside. It feels like in the recruitment stage, people are valued for having more skills than basic requirements for the job itself, but then those are not allowed to be used in any way, and people are asked to stick to the small box of the basic job description. If you hire someone who has initiative and is interested in doing more for the company but keeps getting ignored and sidelined, they will not stay motivated. For example, if one of their motivators to start from the bottom or in another less relevant role is career progress aspects, they will not keep excelling in their current role if they realise they will not be able to use their other skills elsewhere in the company either. It costs money to look for people from outside, so instead of spending time recruiting from elsewhere, why not use the skills that are already in house first and see what kind of value that can bring before looking elsewhere and maybe hiring a person you won’t even need.

3. Not allowing your staff to learn or develop: Staff leaving because they have no room to develop or learn new skills, and then finding a more promising training ground and flourishing elsewhere is another possible donation to a competitor. There are very few people who look for the easiest job possible and do their best not to learn anything new or to develop in any way, even by accident. Most of us need to have something new every now and then to keep our interest in doing our job, especially if we end up in a role that we are not that keen on, but have no choice but to stick to it for the time being. In that case, being able to learn something that we are interested in, or that we can use in the future for something else useful, will help to motivate us even in the current situation. Especially if learning and development have been something that has been advertised as part of the role or have been mentioned in the recruitment phase. If the reality doesn’t match the promise, then motivation probably won’t match the requirement either. 

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4. Not learning from experience: When you have a team on the same task for a different target group/market/purpose, there is no point in repeating mistakes. When someone has worked on the task and learned what works and what doesn’t, that information should be shared and documented for future reference. When there are multiple teams with the same task tackling the same issues, the company is only losing money not learning from the lessons learned. If you combine that with changing staff, those lessons keep repeating endlessly in a loop. Not the best use of money if you ask me.

5. Asking for feedback but not listening to it: If you have a customer feedback box or email, or ask your staff to fill in questionnaires, make sure that what comes through is also seriously considered. I have so many examples of the opposite happening that I don’t understand what the point of asking is if you are not listening. If your customers make time for asking for something, it means they like you and want to give you money. Make sure you try to see how they can, instead of instantly thinking of reasons why you are not interested in finding a way to make that happen.