HR Hacks for Leaders: Taking A Deep Dive into Employee Turnover

Welcome back! Did you take a deep breath after reading about people measures of success last week? I hope so because we are taking a deep dive into employee turnover today. I liken today’s post to deep diving because the topic reminds me of whales diving deep to find things. These whales may not see anything at first but going deeper into the water opens up their options for living. Similarly, we may look at surface numbers for employee retention and miss what’s really happening underneath. We will find new possibilities here.

As I mentioned last week, employee turnover is the amount of people who leave an organization in a given year. As a supervisor, you will want to know your own team’s turnover rate and how that compares to other groups, the overall organization, and the sector. For the purposes of today’s topic, I’m going to use a fictional supervisor and team with 12 members. This will help as we walk through the calculations and examples. Our supervisor’s name is Alice. She’s been newly promoted to supervisor.

Alice is new to the organization, and she is newer to supervising. In her previous role, she managed a team of 2. Now, she has 12 people. In her first 90 days on the job, Alice has constructed a people dashboard for herself that includes employee engagement scores, turnover, salary budget, benefits usage and career & development opportunities for her team. She notices that 3 people have left the team in the last year. Three divided by twelve is a 25% turnover rate. The organization turnover rate is 10%, which is industry average. What might Alice do with this information?

As an HR consultant, I would recommend three steps for Alice. First, I would ask Alice to check in with herself. What assumptions does she have about this team? What beliefs about her team were shared in her orientation? What actions does she want to take now? It’s important to check in with ourselves first because we can misread data or not have all the data when making supervisory decisions. I encourage every supervisor to use the ladder of inference. Starting with action is a surface level activity and skips what’s really happening below the surface. Remember the whale analogy: looking at the surface only gives us partial information.

Alice checks in with herself and realizes that she’s assuming the team must have problems because of the high turnover rate. And she wants to fix whatever is broken right now. However, Alice follows the advice of her HR consultant and moves to the next step.

The second step is reviewing what happened around these job transitions. Why did these three people leave? Leaving a company is not always a bad thing. People leave jobs because family members move to different locations or life changes impact how they can work or they simply retire. Sometimes job changes are made, and people are no longer qualified for the role. Hopefully, Alice’s organization uses exit interviews, which can provide consistent themes on employee transitions. She can also ask her team about the transitions.

Alice asks her team members about the job transitions on her team. She finds out that one person left because their spouse got a job in another country. Another person left because they found a higher paying job. And the third person left because they were just “never happy” according to her supervisor.

Now that Alice has more information, I would ask her to curiously reflect on this data. Based on my experience, I would be curious about the transition that happened when someone just retired on the team. My assumption is that person held a lot of institutional knowledge that was lost when they left. Therefore, it may take more time for the team complete some activities because they do not have the same level of institutional knowledge. I would be curious about how that knowledge is transferred in employee transitions and how that has impacted the team.

Another example is the diversity, equity, and inclusion lens. You may notice that all three people who left are Black while the people who stayed are white. Are Black people leaving more often than other races & ethnicities? This might be an organizational issue that you need to discuss with HR. The same lens could be applied to gender, age, and ability.

Alice reviews the turnover data for her team and sees that women tend to leave more often than men. She also realizes that her organization doesn’t provide information on other genders, so she has a limited view. As she is getting to know the team, Alice is learning that women are not asked to lead as often on projects and feel unheard in team meetings. Alice shares this information with her supervisor, who provides some advice on how to center female voices in her team meetings. As a result, Alice changes some ways that the team engages and provides feedback in their team meetings so that all voices – especially women – are included in every conversation.

This is a small example with big impacts. As you can see, employee turnover is a dynamic and important metric for supervisors. You can tell a lot about your team by this one metric, especially if you are willing to dive deeper and explore new possibilities like our whale friends.

What are you learning as a supervisor? What questions would you have asked in this scenario? We’d love to hear from you on our LinkedIn page. Come back next week to see how Alice starts building feedback loops in her team so she can measure her own success as supervisor.

Photo by Iswanto Arif on Unsplash

The is the second part in a four-part blog series. You can access a free resource for teambuilding on our blog, FREE Facilitation Guide & Video for Reboot Your Leadership — Loftis Partners