Voluntary turnover costs U.S. businesses an estimated $1 trillion a year, and Gallup finds that 52% of departing employees say their manager or company could have done something to keep them. Turnover, in other words, is largely preventable with the right insight.
Strategizing for workforce success depends on accurate information. Identifying trends and understanding market influences allows employers to anticipate workforce changes and adapt. In the modern business environment, workforce intelligence and analytics make gathering this information easier. Workforce intelligence uses constantly updated metrics and demographic details to paint a picture of the workforce landscape. Armed with that information, you can make choices that protect your business from high turnover.
Why Standard HR Metrics Miss the Real Causes of Turnover
It’s normal for businesses to maintain information like hiring rate, resignation rate, and other immediately relevant data. But this information provides a limited view of workforce trends. It can’t account for the influences outside your business that still affect your workforce.
For example, Revelio Labs' own analysis found that culture and values account for roughly 17.8% of the variation in employee ratings — more than compensation and benefits at 12.3%, meaning the biggest retention lever is often culture, not pay.
Workforce analytics is an evolution of these metrics, analyzing trends within your organization, your industry, your area, and the globe. Factors at each of these levels affect your workforce, so understanding them allows you to protect your workforce better. Analyzing these factors with workforce intelligence technology can help you predict and mitigate turnover.
How to Target Turnover With Workforce Analytics
Who Is Resigning and Why?
To apply workforce analytics to reducing turnover, identify where the turnover is happening. If there is a trend in who is resigning, it will be a clue to addressing the cause. If top performers are resigning, a lack of recognition may be contributing. High turnover among management might hint at heavy leadership stress, while team member turnover may suggest a lack of incentives. These aren’t the only possible conclusions, but knowing these trends puts you in a better position to find a solution.
For example, using workforce intelligence, we found that even as median tenure rose from 3.5 years in 2021 to nearly 5 years, new-hire retention continued to fall — and across ~9,000 companies, those that promoted longer-tenured employees saw better first-year retention. It's a valuable finding with an actionable outcome.
What Are the Causes of Turnover?
With workforce intelligence, you can examine causes for turnover. Firsthand information from resigning employees is helpful, but workforce intelligence can supplement it with possible causal trends in your industry and area. If the trends align with what is happening to your workforce, you may have identified a cause. There is often more than one connected reason for high turnover. The more data you have across organizations and demographics, the more accurately you can narrow down points of stress.
How Can You Respond and Improve Retention?
Guided by analytics, you can make changes that both address current concerns and preempt future issues. Sometimes called “employee retention programs,” these systemic overhauls address current causes of low retention while leaving room for adaptation. The retention program can be adjusted as market trends and workforce needs change. Demonstrating this level of flexibility can promote more workforce confidence and retention. As you address these issues, you may be able to reduce turnover and establish a long-lasting workforce.
Putting Workforce Analytics into Practice
Gathering and interpreting the data needed to develop retention programs is not an overnight process. It will take time to identify the trends, causes, and solutions specific to your business. There may be different factors and solutions for high turnover within different organizations in the same business. Workforce intelligence databases like ours at Revelio Labs help to make the process easier. Contact us to learn more about how our data can help reduce turnover in your workforce and improve your company.