Reducing Turnover Starts With Understanding Why They Leave

Having a revolving door on talent really sucks! Your recruiting team works so hard to get those open positions filled, and as fast as they come in through the front door, they quickly slip out the back. In a race to scale up a company, employee turnover can keep your company from ever reaching the finish line. 

Start measuring the why

Good data leads to good decision making, or for those glass-half empty sort of leaders, garbage in equals garbage out. If you ever plan on getting to the root cause of your turnover, you have to start by tracking turnover reasons accurately at a granular level. The old days of only counting turnover as just voluntary or involuntary are long gone. Relying on the best guess of the manager won’t help you either. Did they leave for a  “better job”?  You need to know better – but how? 

Build a process to get the reasons documented in your HCM (a fancy acronym for your HR system of record) straight from your employee's resignation letter, an exit survey, or a post-termination follow-up. The goal is to gather reliable termination data, even if as a last resort, it comes from the co-worker who knew them best. Set a clear policy to never fill in the blanks with random best guesses, as they only corrupt the data and defeat the whole purpose.

See if the data will tell the story

Equipped with the reasons, the solution is easy, right? You just sort the reasons for the whole company from highest to lowest, and develop a strategy to solve the biggest problems first. WRONG! This approach only treats the symptoms of your turnover by addressing the primary turnover reasons of your highest turnover positions. Usually this means increasing employee pay, or adjusting things like schedules, working conditions, job duties, or benefits.

Take this approach instead: Break the termination reasons out by position and then review them from the top of your org structure down. Pay very close attention to why your leaders are leaving. If the leaders tasked with keeping your workforce loyal, productive, and engaged are the ones leaving, then you must solve that puzzle first.

Another approach to consider is to analyze turnover reasons by location, or department first, and then look for the poorest performing locations or departments. You can then work with each business unit leader to identify root causes and solutions.

It’s not just about pay

While pay may be the most common reason people leave, raising that pay may not be the best solution. The majority of workers just face each work day head on, all the while considering if the pay they receive is fair compensation for the challenges they overcome. When workers leave because the pay is not enough, they often mean that the pay is not enough to endure poor leadership, bad working conditions, or a toxic environment. When that’s the case, raising the pay will only treat the symptoms and not the disease. Before you consider pay increases, make certain that working conditions are not the root cause of your turnover.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s Monday Minute. If you have any questions or want to know more about solving retention issues, send me a message or drop a comment below. As always, don’t forget to like, comment, share, and subscribe to The Monday Minute.

Have a great week in recruiting!

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