Avoid the Post-Bonus Departure

In a recent article in HRM Asia, EngageRocket CEO Leong Chee Tung highlighted a problem in Singapore: employees leaving after Chinese New Year, once they have their CNY bonus in hand. That’s not unique to Singapore; many companies see a spike in springtime departures once those bonus checks are cut.

An underlying problem in Singapore — and, frankly, it’s a problem in the rest of Asia, too — is the low level of employee engagement. While plenty of older members of the workforce will no doubt criticize employees who just are not feeling motivated in their jobs, or feeling actively demotivated by a bad boss, the reality is that in the current job market, people have other options, and if they feel their talents are not being best employed, they can and will go elsewhere.

So, how do you keep them? Chee Tung recommends not waiting for a problem to arise, nor waiting around to learn from exit interviews. Instead, recognize that low engagement is pretty common, and step out now to pre-empt it. How? He suggests three key ideas.

– Improve autonomy
– Find ways to nurture mastery
– Over-communicate purpose

We will leave it to you to check out the article if you wish to get down into the details, but we do want to highlight the idea of over-communicating purpose. Even when people know what the organization’s goals and plans are, they may not know WHY those are the organization’s goals and plans. From a motivation standpoint, it’s useful for people to know why they are doing what they are doing, and it’s easier to see how their work contributes to the organization. When it comes to performance, if they know why they are doing what they are doing, they may be able to figure out how to do it better, which can improve revenue or reduce costs (or both). Frankly, most leaders are not that great when it comes to communicating purpose (probably because THEIR leaders didn’t worry about it, back in the day) so this may take the most effort.

Attrition costs you money, and it can hurt performance while you get someone new up to speed, or have remaining employees cover for someone who left. While you will always have some turnover — and that’s not a bad thing — you don’t need to have so much that it hurts you, and you don’t want a lot of it to come at once, in the springtime. Take some steps now to boost engagement levels, and see if you can hold onto a few more people.