Employees Jumping Ship - Should You Care?

By Stefania Viscusi
Assignment Desk, Content Management

Today’s working world is much different from that of decades ago. Most loyal workers stuck around to do their jobs regardless of incentives, as long as it meant making a decent means and putting food on the table. This way of working is a long gone thing of yesterday.

Employees care much more about their work life balance, about job fairness, job growth and where the best opportunity lies. It’s not so much that loyalty is diminishing as it is an eagerness to do better and have the best “ROI” for the work you do. With a workforce motivated by this, it can be hard for any business to understand or anticipate if employees are going to jump ship and how abruptly they may do it – causing a whole other host of issues.

As millennials take over the workplace, a change in how companies treat, track and monitor their employees is happening too. In the smaller, more intimate office settings of the past it may have been totally possible that an unhappy worker would set up some face time with a manager to go over the reasons they feel they should be valued more or receive an increase in pay. Today, with recruiters scouring social media and reaching out to candidates at breakneck pace, it’s a much easier out to just pick-up and go where a better opportunity is presenting itself. Add to that poor treatment, or the feeling like your workplace is a dead end, and the decision is an even easier one to make.

To stay ahead of this happening at your place of employment, it’s important to use new tools and technology that project what’s going on with employees and predict from their behavior if they are planning to jump ship.

 A recent post at Human Resources Online details an offering from NY- based startup Joberate which monitors information about employee web searches on  company computers or even looks at their social media activity to predict if they are scouting out new job offers.

Information like LinkedIn connections or liking companies on Twitter (News - Alert) are just some of the lead indications for example. These predictive analytics are helping to reduce attrition rates that can potentially plague many industries as more millennials make up the workforce.

While this is still new technology, it’s already being seen by some as invasive and Big Brother-like. However, for employers who cannot risk the cost of high turnover and who care to keep their long time employees, it will easily become a key part of their operations in the near future.  Getting informed now is the only way to succeed.