Why do happy employees quit?

Employee happiness is not always the best indication of retention.

You couldn’t be more surprised. One of your top salespeople just turned in her resignation. Within a year of joining your organization, she received a promotion, was given more responsibility and earned more in commissions than anyone else in your district. Plus, she got along great with everyone on her team and had a great attitude in every situation. Why did she quit? She always seemed so happy.

“Are your employees happy?” asks Kevin G. Armstrong speaker, business advisor, and ForbesBooks author. “To be honest, I don’t care and you shouldn’t either.”  Armstrong approaches employee retention from an unusual viewpoint. Although his explanation borders on semantics, his theory is technically valid.

“Happiness is a state of mind,” he says. “You can’t ‘make’ everybody happy because we all define it differently for ourselves and we all have different issues we are dealing with. Instead of worrying about employee happiness, businesses should focus on what he believes to be the number one reason employees leave their jobs. “It’s because they don’t feel valued,” Armstrong says. “And that is a feeling you can do something about.”

Carly Guthrie, a fifteen-year human resource professional specializing in entrepreneurial environments, says one of the most common ways management undervalues employees is when it comes to respecting their time. “Usually the hours are wearing on them or their spouse is on their case because they’re never home,” she says in an interview with First Round. “A really good CEO thinks about the bigger picture and realizes people have lives outside of work.”

She says efforts to make work a fun place to be sometimes create bad morale instead. Holding a weekly happy hour at 4:30 on Friday afternoons is an example of how a nice gesture is actually thoughtless. Employees feel as though they need to make an appearance, all the while dreading a later, longer commute on the start of a weekend.

“Just moving the happy hour to Thursday would show a tremendous amount of awareness and make people feel that much better about the company and leadership,” she says.

Another pitfall in employee retention is management’s lack of engagement concerning individual employee goals. Millennials especially want to hear more from you than that they’ll have a great future at your company. They want you to actively care about their career paths.

Bernard Marr, an author and regular contributor on Linkedin's blog, says you need to make time now for conversations with your staff before happy employees update their resumes. “One idea is to implement stay interviews - instead of exit interviews - to ask your current employees why they stay with the company,” he suggests. “It helps to build a strong level of trust and engagement with employees when they are allowed to bring both their goals and their concerns to a manager.”

Guthrie says mentorships are another way to meaningfully engage with employees, but take time to know the person’s goals and what they want to learn before just giving them a “buddy.”

“Ask every new employee, ‘What do you want to achieve in this job? What other skills do you want to learn or sharpen and how can we help you do that,’” she says. “Just asking this question can convince someone they made the right choice by joining your company.”

Or, as Armstrong puts it, ”For those of you who are now on the ‘happiness’ bandwagon, don’t waste your time. Instead, ensure you are not contributing to an employee’s unhappiness; make sure that every person on your team knows their role, that they are being held accountable, and that they are receiving regular, specific and positive feedback on how they are contributing to the big picture.   Forget happiness!”