How many staff have you lost in the last 12 months?
Do you know?
If you’re a micro-employer, you can probably count it on one finger, but if you’re a little bit bigger you’re probably starting to see a churn in your staff.
I once worked for an organisation that had a phenomenally high staff turnover rate, caused mainly by one-department. We knew it was high and we knew where it was coming from without the need for statistics but what did it mean moving forward? We were spending a good portion of our week interviewing candidates for that team and it was frankly a soul-destroying exercise. We knew that they wouldn’t stay long.
The management team were tempted to sweep it under the rug and pass it off to our stakeholders as a 'deceptive statistic' due to some redundancy action we’d taken in the relevant period.
I started to prepare our figures properly though and could see that without action we were going to lose 1 out of every 2 people we recruited in the next year. We were on a huge expansion drive too so we knew that we needed to take serious action to tackle the problem that we’d got.
How likely is this to happen to you? Do you suspect you’ve got problems across the workforce or just in one particular department?
Even if you don’t have issues now, it’s better to get prepared and get used to preparing your statistics.
If you’re not sure already, the equation for calculating your staff turnover is:
Number of leavers in period
_________________________ x 100
Av. number of staff in period
Be mindful that some sectors have differing staff turnover rates, for example call centres are exceptionally high, so make sure you benchmark your own rate against your industry average.
Do something with the information though. Statistics are there to inform you so ensure that you take action where you need to.
If you are an employer and need assistance with staff and employment matters, talk to Cheryl at PeakHR. We offer competitive rates and cater specifically for small employers.
Please note our blog posts contain general information and are intended as guidance only and should not be taken as an authoritative or current interpretation of the law. Please ensure that you obtain advice tailored to your individual situation before taking action. These posts apply to the UK only.