A recent survey of more than 500 admin workers by recruitment firm OfficeTeam revealed that a majority of administration and office support staff are either looking or considering new jobs due to lack of career development opportunities.
This highlights one of the problems small businesses are facing in light of the current skills shortage, with many employees eager to find better positions with higher pay at rival firms after staying put during the global financial crisis.
Business owners and managers need to respond by giving employees better opportunities and scope to improve their standing within the company if they want to hold on to their staff.
The survey of 540 administrative professionals found 59% are now actively seeking or looking for a new job, with 54% saying that better career options were their main motivation for leaving. Not surprisingly, another 25% said they wanted more responsibility within their roles, 21% said they thought more opportunities were available and 21% said they were simply bored with their current jobs.
This all points to one solution – more, better training.
Administrative staff are some of the most crucial parts of day-to-day operations for a business and it can be significantly costly to replace them. Especially if more than one admin staff member leaves at the same time. When that happens, it can cripple a small business that is already vulnerable.
But the answer isn’t as complicated or expensive as some employers might fear. The survey reveals 44% of workers would like to participate in other aspects of the business, 37% want to attend conferences and other events and 25% want a mentor.
Most of these policies can be introduced without seriously affecting the bottom line. In fact such investments have been shown to give considerable Return On Investment (ROI).
Encouragingly, the survey shows 63% of employees feel training courses could help their career, while 53% said their morale would be given a boost if they had access to more training – especially online training courses, which tend to be extremely cost effective.
You can increase responsibility by giving them additional projects outside of their normal sphere of responsibility and task description.
All of this is especially important for Generation Y employees, because they’re looking at career development and want to have an outline of what’s going to happen with them over the next 12 to 24 months. Often just discussing the expectations and plans is enough to suppress the desire to look elsewhere for direction.
Even though this research focused on administrative employees, suffice it to say it’s analogous to what’s being observed in the food service industry.
