Early Signs of a Flight Risk Employee & How To Handle Them

For most employers, the annual increment session is essential. And this session pushes many employees to choose to stay with the company or resign for better opportunities. As high as 25% of employees are at risk of leaving their jobs at a given point in time. Many organizations declare their promotions and pay increases in this annual session.

If unsatisfied with their pay hikes or climbs, many employees often contemplate looking at greener pastures. HR has a critical role to play. To minimize the risks, they should be looking out to identify flight risk employees, especially top performers and key workers. As per TLNT, the cost of replacing an employee is somewhere around 30% to 50% less than the employee’s salary. 

Recommended Read: Understanding Salary Bands, Job Grades & What HRs Should Know

Who are Flight risk employees?

Flight risk employees are people who are all set to leave your organization because of the greener pastures outside or better opportunities elsewhere. Employee flight risk analysis helps one identify such people so that HR can initiate corrective actions to retain them.

The analysis can help in designing retaining employees, especially the top-performing ones. But, How To Identify Flight Risk Employees? Let’s explore the warning signs.

Recommended Read: 25 Key Employee Retention Statistics For 2022 [Updated]

Signs An Employee Is A Flight Risk

1. Lack of Motivation

The employee lacks motivation. It may not be easy to spot who is not motivated, but this method helps. Look out for people with dwindling performance, lacking interest in work and office-related topics, non-participative in team meetings, etc.

2. Minimal Work Responsibility

They are simply doing the minimum required. Motivated and engaged employees go beyond their routine responsibilities and jobs to do more for the organization. Demotivated people just do as much so that their work is not questioned.

Keep a watch for people who were earlier ready to take on extra responsibilities and now are shrinking away from their jobs. These people could be reporting late for work and finding reasons to leave the office early or on time every day.

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3. Inactive Employees

The employee has suddenly turned inactive. This is a big indicator of an employee who is no longer interested in company affairs. The employee would be usually quiet during meetings and discussions, whereas he was an active participant earlier. Or, the person is mostly argumentative and unpleasant, whereas he was fun to work with in the past.

4. More Leaves than Usual

The employee is taking more leaves than usual. If an employee who was always regular and on time is reporting sick regularly or taking leaves quite often, it could be that they are looking for jobs.

5. No Friends

The employee’s close-knit group is no longer in the organization. When friends in the same organization start to leave, many employees feel lonely and sad and might indulge in job searches.

Recommended Read: Six Causes of High Employee Turnover Rate and How to Fix it

Employee Flight Risk Assessment

Assessing employee flight risk involves three steps:

1. Data collection

Going through data of past employees and assessing the key attributes can give great insight into risk trends. There would be certain common threads connecting all the employees who have resigned. The data can be generated from a basic spreadsheet or an advanced HR software system.

You can checkout attributes like – performance review scores, position when joined and left, the duration or gap since the last promotion, location of the employee, peer feedback, and so on.

2. Model Design

A statistical module can be designed to understand which attributes have caused more employees to leave. You can use Excel sheets, the latest predictive analysis tools, or embedded flight risk predictors. The last two Employee Flight Risk Assessment Tools are automated and offer insight into complex data.

3. Model testing

Ensure that you test the assessment model to determine the desired results. In general, if the model’s success rate is 97% accurate, it can be taken to be good enough for your organization.

What is the Retention Risk Matrix?

The Matrix helps assess flight risks so that employers can create an optimized retention policy, at least for the staff at the highest risk. The Matrix involves four quadrants on a graph that traces low and high flight risks on the y-axis and low to high impact on the x-axis.

People in the fourth quadrant – high risk and high impact – are what HR needs to focus on.

How To Retain An Employee Who Wants To Leave?

• Once identified, it is best to find the exact issue or reason behind their probable resignation.
• If there are visible signs that the employee is about to leave, it is time to communicate how the organization appreciates and values them for their work and commitment levels. Thanking employees, especially those at high risk, can often work wonders, even though the costs involved are minimal here.
• Sometimes, the issue could be because the employee is not getting enough support from the team leader or manager. It is time to step in and extends support – it could be by providing them with advanced tools or resources to make them more productive or offer a change of unit/team, etc.
• Talk about their career growth. Employees can be put through development programs to develop skills.
• Check the compensation metrics, research the prevailing metrics in the market, and try to match them.