Leave your job gracefully and responsibly

There are many reasons why a person leaves the job. There could be reason that you have a better offer from competitors, you have grown to dislike the current environment or perhaps, you feel that you’re ready for the next role… Whichever your reasons of leaving may be, always remember not to burn bridges.

The first thing is to bring across your resignation to your boss. You must react and break the news to your employer in a professional way. It is imperative to leave your job on a high note, and should not impact your future career negatively.

Don’t slack off during your notice period

You want to give your best till your last day at work. Use that notice period, limited days left, to complete the projects you have on hand. Never tell yourself that your days at work is numbered and you should just leave your work alone. Your uncompleted tasks would mean that you might jeopardized a good referee to your future employers, and tarnish your reputation.

Assist in transition

Plan through a proper transition to your replacement. It is important that you hand over your tasks or duties properly. Even if you do not have a replacement reaching your last few days of your employment, you should prepare a detailed handover list or instructions for the transition. You do not want to leave the job and your successor goes around putting comments that you did not provide the details. It would be good to create a daily work tasks and sit down with your managers on the delegation of the uncompleted tasks so you can hand over before your last day.

Don’t burn bridges

Do not leave the job looking too excited. You might make people envious thinking that they are in a very bad environment now.

Resist badmouthing your current environment or colleagues to anyone and no matter how bad it could be, you might just want to leave the job quietly. You never know if you never return or work with the same company again.

BE prepared for exit interview

As much as you have grievances in why some people leave a job, remember that you should keep exit interview professional. You know information are never exactly confidential, as much you the exit interview is conducted with HR personnel and not your direct superior. However, if there are information that can help the company improve areas that they are lacking of, it would be helpful for them.

Why a mentorship program is necessary?

It has been a long time established program, but not many companies have executed the mentorship program. Businesses are always keen on capturing more market share, and to find the cutting-edge factors to enhance revenue. If you believe your people are your greatest asset to your company, then you should consider the mentorship program

These are the following benefits:

Foster a stronger team work

There is a common misunderstanding that only managers or high performing individuals can become mentors. This is not the case. Giving a colleague who have more experience, the opportunity to mentor will allow them to establish, connect and deepen their relationship with their peers.

This further enhance the teamwork between the existing teams, where collaboration can be found readily available.

Helps in recruitment & retention

With a strong mentorship program, incumbents into companies can easily have access to advice from the high performing individuals, whom they may identify as role models. This allows the opportunity for new entrants into the company toquickly understand the company’s culture – which are crucial in retaining the right employees.

Through a strong mentorship program, you are attracting the growing population – which is the millennials. This group of people often require themselves to feel empowered, and are looking for people who can guide them in their career paths. If your employees are performing, your organization is performing as well.

If you can provide the constant need for career development and empowerment for this group, you will also lead to the increased retention of this group of employees as well.

Increased morals

Empowered employees who become mentors would feel that they can contribute back to the organization, which increases their self-worth and job satisfaction.

Mentees would feel that knowledge and advice is readily available, which allows  them to execute their duties more confidently, while allowing them the opportunity to develop their interpersonal skills.

What can you do to ensure that your employees are not suffering from burn out?

Experiencing burn out can be constituted by many different factors. The usual factors are extra hours spend at work, the amount of quality of work expected by managers, as well as amount of work that is required to be completed within a short notice.

However, burn out can also be easily associated with employee’s morale – which can consist of unfair sentiments arising from unfair compensation – on whether someone is getting more highly paid, while performing the same duties or the salary is the same, with one having more duties and responsibilities. It can also be associated with poor management and misalignment of direction. To put it simply, imaging redoing a work several times because of changes of instructions by the management.

These are what you can do to ensure your employees are not suffering from burn out:

Listen

Regardless the amount of work load, you should always make time to engage them to prevent burnout from happening. You should listen, whether is it in an actual complain, or through subtle signs like their tone, their frustrations at work. If you do realize that they might be experiencing a burn out, you can allow them a voice to understand the root of the problem.

This strategy works best, if you empower your employees. Let them know you are always there readily available to hear complains and grievances without providing a judgement – and above being a leader, you’re also a friend.

Provide

To be fair to your employees, you should provide avenues for them to raise their unhappiness to you – whether in the form of a regular employee survey, or one to one talks with their leaders. You need to be able to provide them accessible advice and help to complete the tasks given, or a reasonable deadline for any tasks assigned.

You are also able to provide the environment which minimizes burn out – by providing more welfares such as random parties, good food and providing day offs to celebrate company’s successes.

You can also provide employees with the education on what a burn out feels like – so that employees would be more aware, and will take the necessary actions to reduce burn out.

Be Fair

Evaluate yourself. If you are making decisions irrationally, by providing unfair treatments – then you need to be the change. You must recognize effort rationally and to communicate the rationale on why decisions are made (I.e., why did you promote this person), to reduce any tensions arising from inequality.

If your employee is putting in effort, while still not delivering -  it is of no harm to provide encouragement as well and to see how you can help the employee in reaching the organization’s goals.