Most organizations frequently look at turnover—but they do this at such an aggregate level the measure in and of itself is useless—and not really actionable.
However, by simply segmenting turnover, by tenure, you can drive insight into the multitude of storylines related to this expensive, disruptive and revealing trend.
Here’s why.
First Year Turnover is essential to understand due to its hard cost, opportunity cost, wasted effort and disruption. Just think about the knock-on effects of making the wrong hire—for your company, the team, the hiring manager, the open position, the new employee who might have left another organization for this new opportunity.
Armed with information about your First Year Turnover, you might, amongst other things:
- Identify weaknesses in your onboarding activities;
- Identify inconsistencies between the Talent Acquisition team and hiring managers;
- Realise that you are overselling and/or not delivering employment value proposition;
- Identify a crucial inability to help talent achieve their potential and build value for your organization.
Now add the performance dimension to this turnover, whether it be in the form of talent segmentation, performance feedback, or hard-and-fast business outcomes like attributed sales, utilization or other relevant business outcomes for that individual—and you have something incredibly powerful.
Powerful to the point that by segmenting your First Year Turnover by Performance, you get a whole new picture on the impact of that First Year Turnover.
- Are the First Year Top Performers leaving? What did that cost us? What is the opportunity cost from lost revenue? Was this churn in key value-creator roles and are we still going to make this year’s business plan?
- Are we rapidly dealing with individuals who we might have made a legitimate hiring mistake or simply don’t fit?
- And what are the reasons and rationale for these issues, and strategies to move forward?
Don’t use metrics just because they have always been used, or simply because they are considered best practice—the best practices in HR metrics are built more around the efficacy of HR processes and functions, than business value or the outcomes created by people.
And in our experience, business savvy and action oriented HR folk are rapidly moving towards business value, and helping their organizations understand how their people create competitive advantage, and what the ROI of their workforce programs and people investment are.
It’s your workforce data. You should use it.
John Pensom, CEO
QuIRC, a Canadian company delivering cloud-based workforce and business analytics through their insight-as-a-service offering called PeopleInsight