Turnover data is an important tool that can be used to help determine the overall health of your organization. It can tell you where you’re doing a good job, where you may need to improve, which areas need attention and which programs are working or not working.
Most importantly, turnover data can identify patterns to help reveal the reasons employees are leaving your company. This can also help you determine how to fix the problem if there is one.
For example, if your turnover data reveals that a majority of your employees left within their first two years at your company, you may want to look at your orientation program and review how employees are being brought on board and your training process to see how they are acclimated to the organization and their departments. You may also want to look at your recruiting processes to see if you’re actually tapping the right sources for employees.
If you find you have a relatively short turnover time, you may want to review your job descriptions by asking:
- Are they built using job competencies to identify critical qualifications?
- Are you correctly identifying what is necessary in the roles in order to recruit people?
Another thing to look at in your turnover data is whether or not employees are leaving voluntarily or involuntarily.
If you have a lot of employees who leave voluntarily, you may look at your benefits and compensation packages as well as your company culture. If you have a high number of involuntary terminations, then you know that you may be dealing with employees who have performance or behavior issues or employees who weren’t a good fit for your company. This could also be an indication that your recruiting processes need to be reviewed because you’re not hiring the right employees.
If, for example, you notice that employee terminations are higher from specific departments or that employees who have been with your company for five or more years are now leaving, you may want to take a look at what changes have occurred and analyze what impact the changes had on the employees who left. For longer tenured resignations, employers may find it beneficial to evaluate what entices their employees to leave and find a way to remain competitive and retain the tenured employees.
There’s a wealth of information to be found in turnover data that is valuable to the health of your organization and the culture of your organization, as well.
Common Misconceptions
Employers often look at employee turnover as just a number, but they don’t really dig down deep into the data. There’s so much information that an employer can draw from turnover data if they start breaking it down by departments, by employee tenure, by roles, by managers, etc.
Turnover data by itself won’t tell you everything you need to know to improve employee retention at your company. In order to make turnover data extremely valuable, pair it with exit interviews.
When you pair this data with that obtained from exit interviews—especially exit interview data from employees who are voluntarily leaving—you will uncover a wealth of information.
In my next Insight, I’ll explain more about the effectiveness of exit interviews and give some examples of how the data can be used.