This is a time of year when people reflect on careers and opportunities. Your best people will have aspirations and ability to pursue them.

• Do you know what they are?
• Are you are doing enough to help them stay?

The Mavericks at Work Blog has just published a post helping those with restless hearts and souls to reflect on reasons for leaving or staying in a job. They encourage potential leavers to reflect on the following:

• Does my company stand for something—anything—special? It’s hard to be thrilled with your job if the company you work for is struggling to succeed, or feels stuck and irrelevant.
• Am I excited to see my colleagues when I show up for work on Monday morning? “Working for” a company is an abstraction. The reality is that you work with the people closest to you.
• Do I have a voice at work—does anyone who matters listen to what I say? There’s nothing more depressing and demotivating than feeling that you don’t matter as a person.
• Am I learning as fast as the world is changing? In a world that moves so fast, the most dangerous thing in anyone’s career is the sense that you’re standing still.
• Am I making enough money? Strange as it sounds, this is the worst reason to leave a job.

Research tells us that people ‘join an organisation but leave their manager’.

• Are you doing all that you can to make sure that your best staff, when they think about these questions, decide that there is nowhere they would rather be?

With recruiters telling us that the cost of making a new hire is typically something like 140% of the annual salary of the post this could a very valuable or expensive exercise!