Excellent Employees / Leaving

Turnover is a number that needs decomposing

An overall rate conceals every actionable fact.

A headline turnover figure is nearly useless. What matters is which teams, which tenure bands, which roles, whether the leavers were people the organisation wanted to keep, and whether the rate is changing. All of that is derivable from data every organisation already holds.

Decomposing by manager is the analysis most likely to be resisted and most likely to be informative. Where one team accounts for a disproportionate share of departures over several years, that is not chance and it is not the labour market.

Decomposing by tenure identifies which of the two spikes an organisation has. Heavy early loss points at recruitment and onboarding. Loss at two to four years points at progression. The interventions are completely different and the aggregate rate cannot distinguish them.

It is also worth separating regretted from unregretted departures. An organisation with a high rate that is losing the wrong people has a different and often better problem than one with a low rate that is retaining everybody including the people it should not be.

The other recognition that carries weight is being defended. A manager who takes responsibility publicly for something that went wrong on their watch, rather than locating it with an individual, does more for retention across the whole team than any amount of appreciation directed at individuals.