Top Five Turnover Causes

Data-driven Insights for Employee Retention

ExitRight® recently updated its ExitRight norms based upon responses to benchmarked questions from all clients during 2016 and 2017. These insights are available on all ExitRight user reports and on our instant reporting dashboards. Norms help our clients identify trends, similarities, and outliers in their results compared to other ExitRight users. In our most recent norm analysis, we found interesting results by industry—and for employee turnover as a whole—that we’d like to share. Here are 2017’s top five employer influenced turnover causes across all industries, pulled from a list of 12 reasons.

1. Supervision or Management

When aggregating all employee-influenced turnover data gathered from ExitRight interviews in 2016 and 2017, supervision was the top reason that employees chose to leave their position. When we drill down and look at data across all industries, we find this holds true for industry-specific employee turnover, with the exception of financial services, utilities/energy, nonprofits and schools, where supervision is ranked second in turnover cause importance.

2. Advancement or Promotion

When respondents were asked if lack of upward mobility contributed to their decision to leave, they ranked this cause is second in importance out of 12 turnover causes. Advancement opportunities are of high importance in most industry sectors, with the exception of healthcare (advancement ranked fifth) and schools (advancement ranked sixth). In these two industries, the norm is for employees to stay in their current professional specialty.

3. Compensation and Pay

In most industries, pay ranked third in importance out of the top 12 turnover causes. In the case of nonprofits and retail, pay was of higher importance. However, in schools and healthcare rank, pay was ranked fifth in importance. Pay also shows great variance by position with non-managers and hourly paid workers, who place far more importance on pay than the managers within their organizations.

4. Work Schedule and Life Balance

Work schedule, hours worked per week and work/life balance was the fourth most important turnover cause. While this factor was important for most industries, two industries—healthcare and retail—gave this consideration more importance than any other industry.

5. Work Rules, Policies and Practices

Work rules, policies and practices—though it was the fifth most important turnover cause across all industries—was overwhelmingly the most important turnover cause for professionals in schools. Educators are keenly affected by legislative policy changes and decisions within the school system regarding teaching practices, curriculum and disciplinary practices.

Use ExitRight Norms to Retain Your Best Talent

ExitRight provides powerful internal norms and industry-specific norms for our clients. Collectively this data conveys accurate, fact-based insight that can be used for retention purposes with existing employees. Our ExitRight norms are generated using data from over 160 organizations with a historical database of nearly 1.5 million exits. The companies served have as few as 50 exits to as many as 20,000 per year.

Are you interested in seeing these insights for yourself? Contact us to schedule a free, live demo and take the next step to improve your organization. You can also call us at 877-439-9315 to learn how HSD Metrics can help you find and keep your best employees.