How to find out if an employee is looking for a job
- Low-value employees - inefficient employees or employees who are easily replaceable.
- High-value employees - highly effective employees, employees with rare professions, employees whose personal contacts are key to the company, as well as employees who have access to commercial secrets or any confidential information.
The manager or HR personnel should be informed in advance about the intentions of high-value employees to resign..
Signs that an employee is planning to resign.
1. Decrease in productivity. This can be illustrated as follows. In OctoWatch, the Productivity section displays daily information. By comparing employee efficiencies, you can identify those who have started to perform worse.
2. The employee is late, leaves early, or frequently asks for time off. Go to the Behavior section and then to the Schedule tab. As can be seen in the example below, employee P. not only shows reduced productivity recently but also asked for time off three times in a month.
3. Preparing to leave. Often, employees take client information (and not just their own) with them when resigning. Information is most commonly copied onto flash drives, somewhat less frequently sent by mail or uploaded to cloud services (DropBox, Yandex.Disk). The personnel monitoring system OctoWatch can help prevent this. The program monitors file copying operations to removable drives, file uploads to the cloud, and outgoing emails. In our case, there was indeed a fact of file copying to a flash drive:
A notification was sent to the manager about this, thanks to the configured notification rules:
The program can also be configured to block external drives altogether or to disable them upon detecting confidential information.
4. Resumes.
Most employees look for new jobs by posting resumes or browsing job openings before resigning. See examples below. In OctoWatch, the manager set up automatic email alerts upon detecting the keywords "resume" and "job vacancy". The keywords were detected on the computer screen thanks to the OCR function:
In this example, automatic alerts were not configured. The manager discovered the relevant queries while reviewing the report on the search terms the employee entered in Google:
In this case, a rule detected a job search URL from the "Job Search" group in the browser's address bar:
What actions should be taken?
Never hide what you have discovered. The best approach is to call the employee in and have a direct and honest conversation. If you have only found a resume on an external site, it is not a reason to panic. Observe the employee's work. It may have been posted "in the heat of the moment." However, if the employee clearly states their intention to leave, be prepared to answer the following questions:
Does the employee’s qualification match their responsibilities?
Does their salary match their qualification?
Has their life situation or place of residence changed?
What is the team’s attitude towards the person?
If you have answers to these questions, you can effectively approach the conversation.
