No business is completely immune from employee turnover. Employees leave even the best jobs for family issues, or to pursue higher education, or because they choose to pursue a new career. But if you have lost 2 or more people within a short amount of time (especially if your practice is small), then you may have a larger problem that needs to be addressed.

As the owner of your practice, you may believe that you know your business inside and out. The truth, however, is that there may be issues going on within your practice of which you are unaware. For example, one of your coworkers may be making others uncomfortable via unreported harassment or even body odor issues. Or maybe your competitors are providing benefits that far exceed your current offerings. Or it could be as simple as having inadequate parking for your staff. Whatever the problem, it may be much cheaper (and legally sound) for you to address it head on than to continue to lose staff.

One simple way to discover what may be driving your employees away is to conduct exit interviews. You can do this in person or via email/letter if you are worried that your departing staff may be afraid to be honest with you. It is completely possible that unrelated incidents happened to drive multiple employees away at the same time. But you won’t know for sure unless you can ask your staff to tell you why they are seeking employment elsewhere. When an employee leaves, you suddenly have to shoulder the burdens of spending time and money searching for, hiring, and training new staff. This can be extremely costly, and it will not truly resolve the problem if those employees will be likely to leave as well. Discovering, and addressing, the underlying issues in your practice can help you to keep the employees that you have and can help to prevent wasting money on new hires who are likely to leave if your personnel problems have not been resolved.