Prevent voluntary turnover and retain your best people
When your employees choose to walk out, costs add up fast. Voluntary employee turnover doesn’t just impact your bottom line — it disrupts your entire team.
The cost of voluntary attrition is staggering
Voluntary attrition happens when employees leave on their own terms for personal or professional reasons, rather than factors such as layoffs or termination — and it often happens without warning.
According to Gallup, 36% of employees who quit make the decision without any prior discussion with their manager, and nearly half of all voluntary turnover is preventable with proactive engagement.
Too many managers miss the red flags until it’s too late
The result is more than just an empty desk. When high-performing employees choose to leave, it’s a financial blow that can cost your business anywhere from 1.5 to 2x their annual salary.
Between lost productivity, the expenses of hiring and onboarding, and the lag time before a new hire reaches full productivity, voluntary attrition can drain your bottom line fast. In some industries, turnover rates reach up to 60% annually, creating a cycle of escalating costs and team instability.
With 51% of U.S. employees actively seeking or open to new job opportunities, the message is clear: taking a proactive approach to employee engagement is essential.
How voluntary turnover wreaks havoc on teams and businesses
Voluntary attrition typically means the loss of your best and brightest. High-performers who drive growth and innovation don’t settle for stagnant environments, boring work, or limited opportunities. While average employees, content with the status quo, stay and stifle growth, your best people will find greener pastures.
Left unchecked, voluntary attrition creates a workforce imbalance that weakens your company from within, leaving you vulnerable to greater turnover and operational challenges.
The consequences go far beyond filling a vacancy…
Getting new hires up to speed requires a significant investment.
Recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training each new hire demands attention from multiple departments, which drives up costs and pulls attention away from day-to-day operations. Integrating new hires into your team can strain resources, and if attrition is high, these costs can compound rapidly.
You lose valuable experience and institutional knowledge.
When seasoned senior employees leave, they take critical insights and expertise that can’t be easily replaced. Without their knowledge of processes, partnerships, and company culture, your remaining employees must relearn essential information, which hinders operations, progress, and innovation.
An open position often means others pick up the slack.
When your team is forced to absorb additional work, employees spread themselves thin, resulting in lost productivity, increased stress, decreased quality of work, missed deadlines, and even burnout. Left unaddressed, this imbalance can erode engagement, create frustration, and lead to more departures.
Losing a valued team member negatively impacts morale.
A respected employee quitting can shake a team’s sense of stability and cohesion, especially if they leave unexpectedly. This loss can create uncertainty and cause others to also question their futures. Over time, this decline in morale can reduce motivation and make it harder to retain high performers.
Even the best hires can take months to reach peak productivity.
New hires need time to adapt to the nuances of their roles, build relationships, and integrate into your organization. During this adjustment period, momentum slows and projects take longer. When attrition is high, this cycle of constant ramp-up delays undermines key initiatives and impacts your bottom line.
So, why do good people choose to quit and move on?
Why employees leave and how you can get them to stay
Here’s the thing: Not every departure reflects a work problem.
Some employees choose to retire and others leave for personal reasons that have nothing to do with their work, job, team, or employer. With that said, high voluntary attrition usually signals deeper issues with your overall employee experience, day-to-day work environment, or employee retention.
Here’s why people leave jobs and how MCode can help you turn things around…
Lack of career growth opportunities
Employees want to see a future within your organization, and without clear forward-moving growth paths, they feel stagnant and overlooked. This lack of professional opportunity drives turnover among high performers who crave the opportunity to expand their skills more.
The Fix: MCode reveals each employee’s motivations, strengths, and growth potential, allowing you to design tailored development paths that align with their ambitions, keep them engaged, and set them up for success. Pulse! helps you monitor how they feel about their plan and their work.
Poor management and leadership
People don’t quit companies and they often don’t quit jobs — they quit managers. When employees feel misunderstood, unappreciated, under-utilized, or unsupported by their manager or company leaders, frustration builds, and even the most dedicated workers may decide it’s time to leave.
The Fix: MCode equips leaders and managers with tools to learn the language of motivation, personalize their leadership approach, and create a supportive, trust-based environment. And, our Job Fit Report helps ensure a job fit and manager fit before you make a new hire.
Inadequate compensation and recognition
While competitive and equal pay matters and perks can be fun, personalized and meaningful recognition is equally essential. When employees feel their efforts go unnoticed, their rewards are tokenized, or their compensation doesn’t reflect their experience and contributions, loyalty fades quickly.
The Fix: MCode uncovers what employees value most and Pulse! gives managers personalized insights for managing, communicating with, and recognizing each individual on their team. This enables leaders to create an appreciation strategy that resonates deeply on a personal level.
Limited work-life balance and time off
Exhausted, overloaded employees are at high risk of burnout, especially when the tasks and projects on their plates don’t align with what energizes them. When boundaries between work and personal life blur, employees often look for a more balanced environment.
The Fix: Insights from the MCode assessment and our Pulse! employee engagement platform help managers monitor motivation and understand the types of work that energize each employee. This results in a thoughtful distribution of tasks and balanced workloads that protect employee well-being.
A frustrating, draining, or toxic work culture
When workplace culture becomes toxic, people don’t want to come to work or deal with the drama — and it can send your best people packing. A lack of respect, support, communication, collaboration, or mutual trust can create a hostile environment that fuels disengagement and attrition.
The Fix: MCode Team Workshops (and Pulse! to maintain momentum) help you create a culture where employees feel seen, valued, and respected by aligning work with intrinsic motivation, enhancing team cohesion, and creating an environment built on collaboration and mutual support.
Boredom or lack of challenging work
High achievers want meaningful challenges that push their limits, and when their work feels repetitive or uninspiring, they disengage. Over time, boredom and work that feels like Groundhog Day can drive talented people to pursue opportunities where they feel more engaged and alive.
The Fix: MCode identifies what excites and motivates each employee — what sparks their interest and compels them to immerse themselves in their work. This enables leaders to assign projects that keep them engaged, motivated, and eager to contribute their best.
MCode: Your solution for preventing voluntary attrition
Imagine a workplace where employees see a future they’re excited about and are deeply engaged, valued, and motivated to contribute their best. This isn’t just a lofty vision — it’s achievable when you prioritize understanding and developing your people, and MCode makes it happen.
MCode helps you retain your best people
The war for talent is fierce. Every day, you’re up against competitors just MCode’s motivation-driven tools empower managers to proactively understand what drives their employees, so they can create energizing, fulfilling environments that retain top talent.
Here’s how MCode helps inspire your people to stay:
- MCode gives managers and employees tools to develop a clear path for career advancement, and when they see a bright future within your company, they’re more likely to stay.
- MCode reveals insights into each employee’s preferred communication style and work preferences, ensuring a stronger manager-employee relationship that builds trust and loyalty.
- MCode identifies what motivates each team member, helping managers align work assignments with what genuinely excites them, and when people love what they do, they don’t quit.
- MCode helps leaders understand what energizes and drains each employee so they can inspire high performance and get the best from their people while preventing burnout.
MCode helps you build a team that stays
Creating a culture where high-performers are motivated to stay and grow starts with the MCode assessment — and no, it’s not your typical personality assessment. MCode is a behavioral assessment that uses personal stories of fulfilling work and satisfaction rankings to assess motivation. It gets to the core of drives peak performance.
With MCode, you can create happy, loyal, highly satisfied teams that wouldn’t dream of leaving — and the benefits of reducing voluntary attrition can’t be understated:
- A company that retains its people develops a strong employer brand, making it a sought-after workplace.
- Retaining employees eliminates the costs of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training replacements.
- A stable, cohesive team is efficient and effective. They collaborate well, move fast, and win more often.
- Satisfied employees are more likely to contribute fresh ideas, drive meaningful change, and go above and beyond.
- Employees have invaluable institutional knowledge that is often hard to replace. Keeping them maintains a skilled, knowledgeable workforce.
People who love their work do not quit, so create jobs they love!
Choose MCode and squash voluntary attrition
Our Team Workshops provide discounted assessments, a custom Motivational Team Map, and training customized to your team.
Our Job Fit Reports and Pulse! employee engagement software help you hire the right people, match them with the right manager, tap into their unique MCode to inspire their very best work, and monitor their motivation over time so you can identify risk before it every becomes an issue.
Reach out today to book a meeting with our team to talk about your team and how MCode Products can help retain your best people.