Heinz Landau is a seasoned business leader who has gained valuable working and leadership experience on three different continents.

Managers often don’t know enough about their employees. And this can have serious consequences as a representative study conducted in Germany by the IT services provider Oracle and the market research institute Innofact revealed. 43 % of the 1,000 people between 18 and 65 years that were interviewed in July 2012 want to change their job.

Almost every second person (49%) stated that his boss knows nothing about his career ambition.

30% of the people interviewed mentioned that their boss has no idea how many hours the employee is investing daily in his work.

Every fifth person (22%) thinks that her boss doesn’t know how much she has been contributing in her job to the success of the company.

Strengths (23%) and weaknesses (40%) of the employees are also not well known to their managers.

Employees believe that the main reason for their managers having only insufficient knowledge about them is the lack of time (46%). 37% believe that the managers see their  employees only rarely and don’t have much of interaction.

Every fifth employee (20 %) thinks that his boss is not interested in him.

Not knowing their employees will have a major impact on the loyalty of the employees, since 43% of the persons surveyed want to leave their company. In the age group 30-39 years, even 53% want to quit.

In the study that has just been published this month, the top three reasons for employees wanting to change their job are as follows:

1. Too low salary (63%)
2. Their job is not challenging enough (42%)
3. Employees are not being developed (34%)

Despite the fact that the study was carried out in Germany, I believe we can draw some learnings from it universally.

If you want to have a high employee retention rate, make high employee engagement a priority in your company.

If you want to have a high employee retention rate, make high employee engagement a priority in your company !

Here are some tips how:

-          Devote time and energy to understand your employees and to be understood. It’s a wise investment.

-          Build strong relationships with your employees. Connect with them not only on a professional level (formal approach), but also privately (informal approach). Care about them not only as a professional sub-ordinate, but treat them as a human being too. The way how the boss makes the employee feel, is a key factor for a successful relationship.

-          Give them the feeling of appreciation and trust.

-          Find out what is important to your employees: their goals on the job (from the business perspective as well as from a career perspective), their growth agenda. That doesn’t have to be only promotions and raises (although it is obvious that pay has to be fair and competitive), but can also be giving them recognition and credit for their accomplishments, making them feel valued.

-          Provide guidance to help them to achieve their work and career goals. Provide leadership for them to succeed. Articulate clearly the vision of the company and help them to understand it. An important issue is to assist them to see how their own work contributes to the overall success of the company.

If you will invest enough time in having greater knowledge and understanding of one another, you will surely see the result in form of better employee engagement, higher productivity and higher employee retention.