Top Reasons for a High Employee Turnover Rates and How to Reduce It

You know your employees are an important part of your business.

As Jack Welch, former Chairman and CEO of General Electric said, “There are only three measurements that tell you nearly everything you need to know about your organization’s overall performance: employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow.”

As an HR leader, it’s up to you to own the employee engagement piece and help the business manage people effectively to meet its goals.

So how do you know when your organization is falling short?

Your employee turnover rates are high.

Tackling employee engagement and turnover can feel like fuzzy problems to solve.

How do you identify the source of the problem? Where do you start?

The good news is there are strategies your company can adopt to get things back on track. In the same way that the finance department can tighten up its accounts receivable procedures and the customer success team can conduct training, you can work on your employee retention strategies.

What is considered a high turnover rate?

Before jumping into solutions, make sure you actually have a problem.

You can do this by conducting a benchmarking exercise:

• Comparing this year’s turnover rates against previous years, across the organization and by department
• Comparing your turnover rates to your industry’s average turnover rates

According to LinkedIn data, the turnover rate across all industries is 10.9% with variation depending on the industry:

Average turnover rates may also vary depending on your company’s specialization or what the market’s doing.

For instance, while technology average turnover rates stand at 13.2%, the average turnover rate for data analysts sits at a whopping 21.7%.

Your high turnover rates may be due to high market demand rather than an employee engagement and company culture issue.

That said, doubling down on your engagement efforts may help you keep in-demand employees in a hot candidate market.

Another important metric related to employee attrition is time to fill. How long does it take for your company to hire someone new from the minute a position opens up?

This also differs by industry. For instance, the average time to hire in financial services is 66 days.

It’s worth gathering data at the role level within your company. If you’re a financial services firm, 66 days may be an accurate number for an underwriter but not for an administrative assistant.

Understanding your time to fill helps you understand how much of a financial impact an empty seat will have on your bottom line and whether you need to streamline your recruitment and interviewing processes.

How you can retain employees using Sparkbay

Every week/month/quarter (based on your preference), each employee receives an email from Sparkbay prompting them to answer a short survey.

These short surveys include questions directly related to employee engagement and loyalty, as well as questions on professional growth, relationship with manager and peers, and accomplishment (all of which are clear indicators of engagement and loyalty at both the team and organizational level).

Using this data, Sparkbay captures trends and alerts you in real-time when an employee segment shows an increased risk of turnover.

Sparkbay also uses data from recently departed employees to uncover the real causes behind turnover, empowering you to take early action and address the issues that matter before it’s too late.

We also created a library of easy-to-implement actions from the most successful organizations to help you and your team managers learn how to prevent turnover.

If you're interested in learning how Sparkbay can help you retain your talent, you can click here for a demo.

How to Calculate Employee Turnover Rate

Voluntary turnover occurs when employees voluntarily leaves a company.

The voluntary turnover rate measures how many employees are leaving your organization over a defined period of time.

You need the following 2 numbers to calculate your average turnover rate:

• Average number of employees during the year (E)
• Departures during the year (D)

The average number of employees during the year (E) can be calculated by adding the number of employees at the start of the year to the number of employees at the end of the year, then dividing the sum by two.

Then divide the number of employees who left the company (D) by the average number of employees during the year (A) and multiply this by 100 to get the annual employee turnover rate.

How much does high employee turnover cost your organization?

Published turnover-cost figures are usually national totals or percentage-of-salary rules of thumb. Neither tells you what your own departures cost.

Finance will discount a borrowed benchmark quickly. It will engage with an estimate built from your own payroll, vacancy and output data, especially if you separate cash costs that hit a budget line (agency fees, overtime, contractors) from opportunity costs that don’t (lost output). The two get treated differently in the room, so don’t blend them into one total.

Wayne F. Cascio’s argument in Costing Human Resources: The Financial Impact of Behavior in Organizations still holds: hiring and training are the visible, easy part. A useful estimate also prices the output lost.

The cost often starts before notice is given, as a leaver disengages, and runs until the replacement reaches full output. Most models capture only the vacancy. Whether to include the pre-notice period is a judgment call.

It’s hard to evidence, so most practitioners leave it out and say so.

• Recruiting and onboarding: Agency fees, advertising, assessments, interview hours at a loaded hourly rate, equipment, and trainer time. Also add any pay premium if the replacement comes in above the leaver’s salary. That cost recurs every year and can trigger compression adjustments for incumbents.
• Lost productivity: Use the time-to-fill figure above to count vacancy days, then add the ramp-up period. If you backfill internally, the promotion opens a second vacancy, so cost the chain, not just the first gap.
• Lost knowledge and relationships: Price only what you can point to: a slipped milestone, documented rework, or a client account that moved or went to review. "Tacit knowledge" without a named consequence will be struck out.
• Strain on the team: Overtime, temporary cover, and colleagues’ diverted hours. Watch this line closely, because sustained cover is a common trigger for the next exit.

Build a per-departure estimate with your own numbers: direct hiring and onboarding costs, plus vacancy days × daily output at risk. Use fully loaded employment cost as a conservative proxy for daily output. Revenue per head is defensible for billable roles but invites argument elsewhere. Practitioners genuinely disagree here: loaded cost understates high-leverage roles, but finance rarely contests it.

Then add ramp-up days × the new hire’s daily output gap, documented project or client losses, and the cost of team cover.

For roles without a clear output measure, use the cost of temporary cover, and label it as a floor rather than the true cost.

Subtract the salary you did not pay during the vacancy. Keep overheads that kept running, such as licences, space and benefits contracts. Leaving the unpaid salary in is the fastest way to lose finance’s trust in every other line.

Keep each assumption visible next to its number, and check every day of the vacancy is counted once.

If overtime or a day-rate contractor covers part of the vacancy, count the cover cost for those days and drop the output loss. Counting both is the most common double-count.

In complex roles such as engineering, account management or specialist clinical work, ramp-up usually outweighs hiring costs. Measure it from your own milestones, such as time to first independent case or time to full quota, rather than asking managers to guess. Do you already track those milestones for recent hires?

If not, that gap is worth fixing before the estimate.

In high-volume roles with short training, the reverse holds. Recruiting and onboarding dominate, and departure volume drives the total. Here early-tenure exits are usually where the money goes, because you absorb the full hiring cost and get little output back.

Present a low and a high estimate rather than a single figure.

A range shows which assumption moves the result most. Finance will find that assumption anyway, so name it before they do.

Next, decide which departures to multiply by.

Not all turnover is a loss. The exit of a persistent low performer or a planned role elimination belongs outside the calculation. Some practitioners still count the replacement hiring cost for low-performer exits but not the output loss.

Either approach is defensible if you’re consistent.

Apply two filters: was the departure regrettable, and was it avoidable through better management, pay, workload or career paths? A strong performer relocating for a partner’s job is regrettable but not avoidable. Exit-interview reasons skew toward socially safe answers, so classify with the manager at the time of exit and check against earlier signals where you have them.

Use the classification as a guide, not a trap. A borderline case isn’t worth an hour’s debate.

Multiply the per-departure estimate by the avoidable departures in a role or team to show the savings. Frame it as a realistic reduction, not elimination. A claim that every avoidable exit can be prevented won’t survive the first question.

Break the total down by team and by tenure before reporting it.

Costs tend to cluster in a few teams or in first-year exits. An organization-wide average hides exactly where intervention pays back.

Add knock-on departures only when your data shows them, such as several exits from one team within a few months of a key colleague or manager leaving.

Assuming contagion without evidence inflates the figure and invites the same scepticism that headline statistics attract.

What are the causes of high employee turnover?

You’ve identified an increase in your year-to-year turnover rate across different functions. What’s causing this problem?

There are a number of possible issues. Before choosing a course of action, invest time into identifying the correct source of the turnover.

High employee turnover related to employee dissatisfaction

If you’re in HR, you know there’s a strong link between low employee engagement (or job dissatisfaction) and high turnover.

In fact, there’s research that outlines the steps an employee goes through to transition from disliking their job to actually quitting:

• They think about quitting
• They weigh the cost of looking for another job and the risk of quitting their current job
• They make plans to start looking for another job
• They start looking for a new job
• They evaluate what’s on the market
• They’re presented with specific opportunities and compare them to their current role
• They quit

How far an employee moves through this funnel depends on how bad their work experience is.

After a tough week, they may go no further than step two. After an awful year, they may jump straight from step 1 to step 5.

The key thing to understand your company’s culture is strong enough to keep employees from jumping past step 1.

Low job ssatisfaction stems from many sources. Your employees may be dissatisfied because of:

• Limited career growth
• Toxic managers or colleagues
• Low pay or few benefits
• Lack of strategic direction or support
• Micromanagement
• Lack of challenging or interesting opportunities

Identify the most pressing sources of employee dissatisfaction and take steps to address them. You may decide to:

• Introduce clearer career progression plans to demonstrate there are opportunities for growth
• Re-train leaders to implement effective management techniques, identify toxic behaviors, and implement a zero-tolerance policy
• Conduct a salary benchmarking exercise to bring your employees’ compensation in line with industry standards
• Communicate the company’s mission and purpose and create a framework that describes how each function contributes to larger business goals to provide a sense of direction

High turnover related to age

Age is another cause of high turnover. As your workforce gets older, the number of people leaving due to retirement or early retirement increases as well.

While this is not a sign of disengaged employees, it is a sign that you’ll need to plan ahead in terms of recruitment.

It’s also a sign to create a plan for documenting “institutionalized knowledge”.

When older, experienced employees leave they take ample knowledge and experience about how to get stuff done with them.

Outside of retirement, research shows there isn’t a strong relationship between age and voluntary turnover (people leaving for work at another company).

Whereas a slight decrease in employee engagement can lead to an uptick in employee attrition rate, the same isn’t true for age.

High turnover related to tenure

Thirty-eight percent of employees leave within the first year. Of those employees, forty-three percent leave within the first 90 days. This may be due to a poor onboarding process, lack of support, or unmet expectations.

On the flip side, longer tenure employees tend to stick around. That said, an employee with a long tenure may not be the most productive employee.

According to one study, employee productivity went up after one year and began to decline after five years. Keep in mind that this isn’t about age, but about the length of time that an employee has been with a specific company.

It’s important not to make blanket generalizations that deem every long-term employee unproductive.

Instead, understand your tenure-related turnover and tenure-related productivity. If you notice an issue take corrective measures like:

• Improving your job descriptions or employee onboarding when you experience high turnover among employees working for less than a year
• Improving development opportunities and clarifying advancement opportunities when there’s increased turnover among employees working between 3 and 5 years
• Re-evaluating compensation rates and workplace expectations when there’s a diminishing return on investment for long-term employees

High employee turnover related to career risk triggers

Life events and meaningful dates can cause employee attrition. Employees will step back and reflect on their career. They’ll ask questions about their happiness, sense of fulfillment, and whether their current role aligns with their values or desires. This includes events like:

• Work anniversaries
• Birthdays
• Marriage or divorce
• Childbirth
• Loss of a loved one
• Serious illness

Other potential triggers are major changes within the company such as a massive lawsuit, a change in leadership, or a merger.

Proactive companies address these career risk triggers by scheduling career check-ins around important dates or events when they know about them.

These conversations give employees an opportunity to speak freely about their shifting priorities and for employers to see how they can hang on to a valued team member.

For example, a new parent may question whether their current workload or hours are sustainable. A proactive employer can come to an alternative working arrangement.

What are strategies for reducing a high employee turnover rate?

Replacing an entry-level employee can cost 30% to 40% of their annual salary. This goes up to 150% for mid-level employees and 400% for highly-skilled employees. If you have a high turnover, fixing it is a worthy investment.

Use data to predict when employees are likely to leave

Don’t wait until your employees say they want to leave to try and convince them to stay.

At this point, they’ve lined up another job and are excited for this change.

Plus, job seekers are usually advised not to accept a counteroffer from their current employer.

Instead, use data to understand when to have retention conversations.

Segment your data based on demographics, tenure, job type, and any other metrics you believe impact your employee turnover rates. Use this data to identify when managers should schedule retention conversations. Your HR team will receive an alert when employees reach their second year. This triggers a one-on-one conversation about that employee’s goals and what their future at your organization looks like.

You can also conduct exit interviews, collect that data, and use it to identify other employees dealing with the same challenges.

Sparkbay uses feedback data from recently departed employees to uncover the causes of turnover. Then, it uses trends to understand which employee segments are most likely to leave.

After you identify employees that are likely to leave, take actions to address these issues. An investment in retention is essential to put your predictive analytics to good use.

Ultimately, re-engaging disengaged employees is a smarter investment than hiring brand new ones.

Keep your compensation and benefits competitive

Your employees work to make a living. If they can’t do that, they’ll begin to look for other opportunities.

Ensure the salaries and compensation you offer lines up with what other companies offer for the same roles and the same level of experience.

You can determine your floor and ceiling by looking at the market through a salary survey or benchmarking exercise. This will give you salary brackets that you can further sub-divide based on level of experience.

Another way to determine your ceiling (not your floor) is to determine how much a specific role is worth to your company.

You determine this by figuring out how much they’ll make (for revenue-generating positions) and how much they’ll save (for non-revenue-generating positions). If you work with a staffing agency or recruitment firm, you can ask for their input as well.

Use these market rates as a guide, not a trap.

If you’re hiring a product management executive with experience developing the exact product you’re trying to create or marketing director with extensive experience breaking into your new target market, don’t let salary bands get in the way of the hire.

This goes back to the other method we mentioned for determining your ceiling: Determining what a role is worth to your company.

Part ways with employees who aren’t suited to the role

Firing employees sounds like a counterintuitive way to reduce employee turnover rates.

Nevertheless, it’s an important way to keep turnover low. The wrong hire can disrupt a team, create a toxic work environment, or put others in the position of fixing their mistakes.

This causes a scenario where several good employees leave for every one bad hire.

Amazon offers employees a cash bonus for quitting. Employees are eligible for $2,000 after year one, with another $1,000 for every year until they cap out at $5,000. Amazon believes keeping an employee that doesn’t want to be there is bad for business.

Recognize and reward employees

Employees are 63% less likely to look for a new job when they feel recognized and rewarded for their efforts. In one study, nearly 80% of employees who quit their job cited a lack of appreciation as a major reason.

There are different ways to recognize employees including gifts, awards, cash bonuses, and public acknowledgement. Companies can introduce formal programs that give colleagues an opportunity to acknowledge their teammates.

Recognition impacts how much effort employees put into their work. When managers reward employees for their efforts, there’s a natural instinct to continue doing the things that elicit that praise.

It also encourages employees to put in more “discretionary effort”, which is the work they don’t really have to do.

This might be going above and beyond with a customer, looking for creative solutions to a problem, or designing a new process that saves the team time.

Since employees are paid the same amount every two weeks, there isn’t much financial incentive to go above and beyond aside from a potential bonus at the end of the year.

Recognizing employees who go above and beyond increases the amount of discretionary effort. It also reinforces expectations since other employees learn what receives rewards.

Be intentional about your employee recognition program. Building an employee recognition program is different from the kind of casual praise an employee might receive from a supervisor that’s paying attention.

Identify the desired behavior you want to see in your organization and tie them to rewards.

Sparkbay makes it easy to go to one spot and have a bird's eye view of what's happening. Each manager can pinpoint the goods and where to improve.

How NARS reduced turnover by 10% with Sparkbay

Learn more

Revisit your hiring and onboarding process

Are you hiring the right people?

If you’re hiring individuals whose values don’t align with your company’s values, then there’s a chance they’ll be leaving rather quickly.

Evaluate your job postings and consider whether they offer a realistic picture of the work new hires will do.

For instance, do you hire developers with the promise of working on interesting projects only to relegate them to “code monkey” roles? They’ll likely leave for something more compelling within a few months. It’s worth either restructuring the role or being more transparent in the job posting, so you can attract the right fit.

Another cause of turnover is a poor onboarding process.

Sometimes, organizations suffer from a bad onboarding process, because they don’t completely understand what onboarding is. Case in point: Mixing up orientation and onboarding.

Orientation happens on the first day and includes tax forms and cursory information about the company.

On the other hand, onboarding is a long-term process that helps employees understand the company’s unique value, understand how their work fits into the larger business strategy, and find the information and tools they need to succeed.

Good onboarding programs include:

• Mentors who serve as a new hire’s guide to the organization and help them integrate into the team
• Clarity about their goals and expectations and an understanding of what they’re expected to achieve and when
• One-on-one meetings with their managers to receive guidance, ask questions, and receive constructive feedback to avoid anxiety and uncertainty about their performance to date
• Overview of their potential career trajectory and what the opportunities are within the company
• Introductions to key stakeholders the employee needs to work with as well as an opportunity to get to know team members

An effective onboarding program can mean the difference between a great new hire floundering and a great new hire sticking around for the long haul and delivering value to the company.

Support your employees’ development

Employee development is when companies help their employees learn new skills or enhance their existing skills. This is beneficial for both employers and employees.

For employers, it adds to the company’s internal capabilities. This is more important than ever as employers realize re-skilling, not hiring, is their best strategy for keeping up with an increasingly digital, data-driven economy.

For employees, professional development enhances confidence and helps them feel like they are progressing as employees instead of stagnating.

Employers can offer a yearly allowance for professional development activities that employees can put towards courses or earning professional designations.

Employers can also offer advanced training seminars for skills they want to build within their workforce such as digital skills, leadership skills, or creative problem-solving skills.

Your professional development initiatives work hand in hand with your career planning efforts to reduce employee turnover.

When you discuss possible career paths with your employees, you’ll share requirements for obtaining promotions such as years of experience, advanced degrees, or professional designations.

Once employees know that they can advance and have a clear path, they can use your professional development offerings to move forward, deepening their relationship with your company and their plans to stay long term.

Analyze your company culture

Company culture has a big impact on your employee turnover. Company culture refers to the values, attitude, and behaviors of the people that work within an organization.

Leaders can’t force culture, but they can certainly model and reward desired behavior.

Some company cultures may focus on fierce competition and individualism while others focus on collaboration and teamwork.

One culture isn’t necessarily better than another. For instance, a company that makes its money through sales may want to encourage healthy competition while another focused on research and development may want to foster collaboration and teamwork.

The most important activity for HR is understanding the culture and making sure it aligns to the organization’s goals.

Once you understand your culture, you can reinforce desired behaviors and choose employees who are suitable for the work environment. Understanding that you’re a high performance, results-driven company helps you avoid hires that don’t thrive well in that environment.

This extends beyond obvious roles, like sales roles. For instance, if you’re hiring for an administrative role in such a culture, you’ll want a receptionist or administrative assistant that understands how to prioritize requests to capitalize on business opportunities.

Analyzing your culture also helps you spot toxic elements and address them before they drive out your people. A toxic culture can be due to fear, like fear of failure or fear of speaking up, harassment, disrespect, or confusion about the company’s direction and expectations.

If you’re not sure what the cause of dysfunction is, prioritize asking them. Distribute pulse surveys to get a sense of employees’ biggest concerns and then act on them to build goodwill.

Equip managers to prevent turnover on their teams

"Train your managers" is where most retention advice ends, and it explains why most manager training changes nothing. The useful questions are narrower: what should a manager do differently on a Tuesday afternoon, and what evidence would show you they did it?

Trace resignations back far enough and they rarely start with policy. They start with support that never arrives, expectations that shift without explanation, growth that stalls, or a workload that never lets up. Your policies can be competitive and still be delivered badly, one team at a time.

Buckingham and Coffman’s argument in First, Break All the Rules is that the immediate manager does more to keep a talented employee than company-wide pay or perks. You already know it, so here is the less comfortable implication: HR owns the policy, but managers own how people experience it. That makes your real retention lever manager behavior, and content alone does not change behavior.

So skip the next training module. Pick a few habits, make them visible, and hold managers to them until they are routine. Julie Zhuo’s framing in The Making of a Manager is the right foundation: the one-on-one belongs to the employee. It is where their concerns get airtime, not where the manager collects status updates. If you suspect many of your managers run it the other way around, you are probably right.

• Hold regular one-on-ones, and protect them. Three moves: ask what is getting in the way, follow up on what was raised last time, and end with one agreed next step the manager writes down. Practitioners disagree on weekly versus biweekly, and honestly, consistency matters more than cadence. What matters is what happens under pressure. A manager who moves a one-on-one to later in the week signals something very different from one who drops it. Cancelling during a deadline crunch teaches the team that their concerns rank below delivery, and that lesson outlasts the deadline.
• Talk about careers before someone starts looking elsewhere. Managers rarely skip these conversations for lack of skill. They skip them because they fear creating expectations they cannot meet. Remove that fear by giving them a concrete menu: a stretch assignment, a lateral move, or visible ownership of a project. "Not yet," with a specific path, keeps people. Silence sends them to recruiters. One check worth running on your own side: if internal moves need the current manager’s approval, your strongest people are probably being held back by the managers who depend on them most. They will find their next move outside instead.
• Check workload across the team, not person by person. Look at deadlines, after-hours messages, and who keeps absorbing urgent requests. The usual pattern is that the most reliable people get the most interruptions until they burn out or leave. Because they keep delivering, their overload rarely shows up anywhere until they resign, and much of what they handle is undocumented. Redistribute that work deliberately, even when it is faster to keep handing it to the same person.

A quick test for whether these habits are working: can the manager name each direct report’s biggest current frustration and their next career step? If not, the one-on-ones are status meetings with a different name. Use this as a spot check in skip-level conversations, not as a trap.

Most managers who fail it simply never realized they were supposed to know.

Managers also need a signal before the first resignation letter arrives. Anonymized, team-level engagement results provide it. Compare each team against its own history, not the company average.

A team that has sat at a middling score for a year is often less urgent than a strong team that drops sharply in one cycle. The other signal to watch is the same workload concern coming back survey after survey, which means someone is hearing it and not acting.

How a manager responds matters as much as the signal itself. Share the result with the team, ask what would need to change, then report back on what was done, including what was not done and why. Skipping that last part does almost as much damage as ignoring the survey.

Trying to work out who gave a low score destroys trust and guarantees less honest answers next time. Treat it as a serious breach rather than a coaching moment, and expect it most on teams that barely clear the anonymity threshold.

One edge case: on very small teams, results stay hidden to protect anonymity, so the manager gets no team-level breakdown. Those managers need to rely more on one-on-ones, skip-level conversations, and results rolled up to the next level. Some HR teams lower the threshold to get more coverage.

Others hold it firm because people answer more candidly when they believe their responses are anonymous. Reasonable people land on both sides. If you lower it, say so openly to employees rather than letting them find out.

In Sparkbay, report access is mapped automatically to the org hierarchy, so each manager sees results only for their own teams. Results stay hidden below a configurable minimum number of responses, five by default, so managers can act on team patterns without seeing who said what.

Protect your employees’ work-life balance and offer flexibility

Few things are more frustrating for an employee than liking their work, but quitting anyway. When they fill out their exit paperwork, they list "better opportunity" as the reason for departure. But when discussions about workload issues happen, they often happen months after the employee leaves, and are often indirect.

Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter, authors of The Burnout Challenge, describe burnout as a chronic mismatch between the person and the job. This makes things like resilience training or wellbeing apps less focused on the actual problem. It’s easy to understand and agree with changing the job to fix the mismatch. But it’s hard to get leadership buy-in when a wellbeing vendor offers a cheaper, faster, and more visible option.

In their framework, Maslach and Leiter outline six areas for this mismatch between individual and job: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. This isn’t a checklist for average job satisfaction. It’s a mismatching, diagnostic system.

Feeling mismatched in just one of these areas can overshadow perfect scores in the other five and lead to attrition.

This also explains why implementing flexibility perks often fails to improve retention rates. Flexible work hours don’t make up for an overloaded workload or a lack of recognition or opportunities for promotion. An employee who can work flexible hours but has to log off at midnight to finish an impossible workload isn’t benefitting from flexible hours - they’re just free to choose which part of the night they sacrifice.

Assess the workload of your teams, one by one. If you look at the average across the company, you might miss two or three teams that are managing an inaccurate workload.

Ask your managers to assess the following:

• The deliverables their team is expected to commit to this quarter (based on planning artefacts not memory)
• How much their team is actually committing/working based on triangulated data from team-level signals such as after-hours meeting loads or workload related questions in pulse surveys (these triangulations are more accurate than timesheets which are often not filled out for salaried employees).
• The number of open roles or positions where one or more employees are managing two jobs

The third point is often underestimated. An open role doesn’t simply hamper the output of one person. It also impacts the people who are tasked with managing additional responsibilities related to interviewing and onboarding.

If a mismatch in workloads is truly temporary (e.g. related to a product launch or seasonal uptick) then your managers can focus on adjusting timelines with the understanding that they’ll schedule real recovery time afterwards. A good way to evaluate this is to see if these ‘temporary’ mismatches keep being rebranded as new ‘temporary’ mismatches each quarter.

After one or two work cycles of a mismatch, you’ve got yourself a staffing problem, and your options are to either remove work or add capacity.

Removing work means identifying specific tasks, reports, meetings, etc. that will be removed from the team’s responsibilities. This also involves informing stakeholders who requested them and ensuring leadership resists pressure from these stakeholders to reinstate them. Without this, your managers learn that removing work is a career risk, and they stop trying.

Burnout also has leading indicators that happen well before people submit their resignation. Signs include working overtime, not using vacation days, taking sick days on short notice, and people no longer responding as fast as they used to. It’s important to assess these signs both individually, in the context of each team’s base level, and collectively.

While all of these things can be explained away on their own, seeing several of these signs in one team is cause for concern.

In particular, avoid over-reading the signal sent by unused vacation days, as this is the most ambiguous of these leading indicators. It can be a sign that employees feel unable to step away from work, but it can also be a sign they’re legitimately saving their days for a long trip or to extend their parental leave. To assess this properly, analyze vacation day usage at the team/manager level rather than looking at an average across the company.

Conduct this analysis in the context of your vacation day carryover rules. If employees lose vacation time because of a use-it-or-lose-it policy, this is a stronger leading indicator than if there are sizable vacation day balances with a generous carryover policy. There are differing opinions among industry practitioners on how much weight to put on this leading indicator with a generous carryover policy, so use it as an opportunity for further exploration rather than to make instant judgments.

Offering employees flexible start and finish times or the option to work hybrid or remotely if their role allows is an obvious way to enhance employee work-life balance. But again, things get complicated. A policy like this can quickly become a "luck of the draw" based on who my manager is, which introduces another fairness issue.

That fairness issue will show up in your engagement data even before it manifests in grievances, so watch out.

For on-site and frontline workers, work-life balance is different. It’s not about sending employees home for the day whenever they like. It’s about giving them more notice about their schedules, the ability to swap shifts without approval from their manager, or a genuine ability to work shifts of their choosing.

If employees work shifts, they’ll often value a predictable schedule more than the option to work outside the office (when they can’t take advantage of that option anyway).

Imagine the havoc a shift rota that regularly changes on short notice (e.g. three days before the shifts) can cause to workers’ childcare arrangements or second jobs. This is a problem that can’t be solved with a flexible working policy.

And again, there’s a fairness concern here. If companies reinvent work-life balance for remote employees or office workers and offer a token gesture to frontline workers, they risk upsetting employee goodwill.

In addition, enhanced work-life balance (e.g. flexible hours) introduces a second-order problem that companies often fail to account for in their retention business case.

For example, offering flexible hours across different time zones can lead to a longer collaboration window that compels workers to respond to requests or work outside of normal working hours. This can create an "always-on" culture that no one explicitly signs up for.

There’s also the possibility of creating "proximity bias" where remote workers lose out on stretch assignments or promotions to the people who sit desk to desk with the boss.

To spot and counter this, conduct audits of promotions and high-visibility project allocations based on work arrangements, not just demographics. There’s an opportunity here to uncover hidden biases that would be missed by demographic-focused audits.

Establishing explicit norms about core hours, expected response times, and coverage areas is a great way to avoid the unintentional creation of an always-on culture.

But instead of establishing a single, company-wide set of rules, it’s better to have documented norms on the team level. This is because an answer for a client-facing team and an engineering unit would be different. Plus, a single, company-wide answer either gets ignored or gets applied in the wrong context.

In addition, leaders have to model these boundaries, and not every example does. For instance, a VP who sends a message with "send when you’re ready" but then responds within minutes on a Sunday models a boundary in name only. Similarly, publicly praising an employee for their quick turnaround of a Sunday night fix sends a message to the whole team about what actually gets rewarded.

A good question to ask is when was the last time each member of your executive team took two consecutive weeks off without checking in with anyone? If you don’t know the answer to this question, or the answer is "never", then this is one of the work-life balance standards your staff will look at.

Employees absorb cues about how to behave and what’s expected from what senior leaders do, not from what the company policy says. All it takes is one late-night email from a VP to negate pages of work-life balance policy language.

Use stay interviews and exit interviews to learn why people leave

Exit interviews tell you how people explain a decision once it is made, and that explanation has been edited for the reference letter and the leaving drinks.

Stay interviews reach people while the decision is still open, which is the only point where you can change the outcome. The trade-off is that what you hear depends almost entirely on how safe the employee feels with the person asking.

Each source fails in a predictable way: exits soften criticism of the manager, and stay conversations go quiet on the manager whenever the manager is the one asking.

Use both, code them against the same list, and treat anonymous survey results as the tie-breaker before you act. You probably already run some version of this.

Ask current employees what would make them stay

Keep stay interviews well away from the compensation cycle, not just from performance reviews. Otherwise "what would make you stay?" gets heard as an invitation to negotiate, and you collect salary asks instead of conditions.

Send the questions in advance and say plainly that this is not an assessment. Then limit the outcome to one or two follow-ups. Managers who leave with a list of eight items tend to deliver none of them.

As Richard P. Finnegan argues in The Power of Stay Interviews for Engagement and Retention, the value comes from the manager asking what keeps someone at work and what would push them out, and then owning the actions that follow rather than handing the problem back to HR. If HR ends up holding the follow-ups, you have built another engagement survey with worse anonymity.

• "What part of your work would you miss if you left?"
• "What makes a hard day harder than it needs to be?"
• "When did you last think about leaving, and what prompted it?"
• "What is one change I could make that would help you stay?"

The third question is phrased deliberately to mirror the exit question about when leaving first felt likely. That lets you compare near-misses among stayers with actual triggers among leavers. Treat the list as a starting point.

Choose who runs the conversation based on the relationship.

The direct manager is the default, because they control most of what employees raise: workload, recognition, schedule and development.

Switch to a skip-level leader or an HR partner when survey results for a team point at the manager, or when the team has just been through a reorganisation. Otherwise the topic that matters most is the one nobody mentions. Even then, route the agreed actions back to the manager wherever possible, so the skip-level does not quietly become the team’s real line manager.

Decide who to talk to first.

Start with new hires around the end of their first quarter, when the gap between what was promised and what they found is sharpest. Add people in roles you cannot refill quickly, anyone recently passed over for promotion or moved into a changed role, and close colleagues of a regretted leaver. Departures tend to cluster, because one exit makes searching feel normal to the people around it.

The usual failure mode is a manager who explains why the policy exists. That deserves explicit rehearsal in manager briefings, along with not promising changes outside their authority.

When an employee raises a problem, agree on who owns it and the date they will hear back, even if the answer is no. A clear no with a reason is far less corrosive than a vague "I’ll look into it."

A stay interview with no follow-up does more damage than skipping it, because it teaches the employee that speaking up is pointless. It also tells them their manager now knows they are a flight risk.

Give leavers a consistent, low-pressure way to speak

Offer a structured exit interview with someone outside the employee’s reporting line, and let the leaver choose between a conversation and a written response. Some people will say in writing what they would never say to a face.

Ask the same core questions across departures: "What prompted you to start looking?", "What could we have changed?", and "When did you first feel that leaving was likely?"

The last question matters most.

Turnover research by Thomas Lee and Terence Mitchell describes departures as unfolding over time, often set off by a specific jolt such as a reorganisation, a rejected request or a new manager. An unsolicited approach from a recruiter can be the jolt too. That is why "I got a better offer" often describes the trigger.

Knowing when the decision started tells you where intervention was still possible, which a list of complaints does not.

Probe specific events, such as a role change or a missed promotion, without pressing for names the leaver does not want to give.

Timing changes what you hear.

In the final week, people still need a reference and a clean exit, so they soften criticism.

A short written follow-up a month or two after departure gets more candid answers about the manager and culture, at the cost of a lower response rate. Running both gives you the volume of the first and the honesty of the second. Practitioners genuinely disagree on whether the follow-up is worth the effort at low response rates, but it is often the only place where manager-related themes surface at all.

Tell leavers who will see the notes and how HR will use them.

When reporting to leaders, separate themes from identifying details, especially in small teams. Do not promise anonymity for an interview where the person is obviously identifiable. Promise confidentiality in handling, and be precise about what that means.

Some leavers will hold back to protect relationships or future rehire chances, so treat any single account as a lead to check, not a verdict.

Check interview themes against anonymous surveys

Tag stay and exit interview themes with one shared list, such as workload, manager support, pay, growth and flexibility, so stayers and leavers are described in the same terms.

Record two things for every leaver: the trigger (the event that started the search) and the underlying driver (the condition that made the trigger decisive).

This separation stops "pay" from swallowing your data.

As Leigh Branham argues in The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave, pay is the easiest reason for people to give. The causes beneath it are more often unmet expectations, stalled growth and feeling undervalued, and most of those sit within management’s control.

A leaver who says "better offer" and also says "I stopped seeing a path here" is a growth problem that pay happened to resolve. How many of your current "compensation" exits would survive that test?

Keep these coding rules so the comparison holds up:

• Have HR or a trained reviewer assign the codes, not the departing employee’s manager, who has a stake in the answer. Double-code a sample now and then to check that reviewers apply the list the same way.
• Split regrettable from non-regrettable departures before looking for patterns, so the themes reflect the people you wanted to keep.
• Wait for a theme to repeat across several leavers in a group before acting on it. With three or four exits in a department, one vivid story distorts the picture.

Then compare the themes with regular anonymous survey results by team or employee group, but only where enough responses protect anonymity.

Below that threshold, report at the next level up rather than cutting the data finer or reconstructing small groups from filters.

The gaps between sources are the useful part.

If leavers repeatedly cite workload but current employees rarely raise it in stay interviews, the survey shows whether the problem is widespread and under-reported or concentrated in a few teams.

If stay interviews and surveys both flag growth but leavers never mention it, check whether your exit process feels safe enough for honest answers. Then check whether "growth" exits are being coded as pay.

After a retention change, track the relevant survey question alongside regrettable voluntary turnover and new interview themes over several survey cycles.

Turnover moves slowly and lags the conditions that cause it, so expect survey scores to shift first. Do not declare failure because attrition has not moved in a quarter.

If workload scores improve but workload still dominates exit interviews, look for teams the change did not reach before calling the action a success.

Tell employees what you heard, what you changed and what you decided not to change and why.

It’s worth investing in retention strategies to reduce employee turnover

Employee turnover is one of the most important business metrics. HR leaders can enhance their function’s value by identifying the common causes of high employee attrition, such as low job satisfaction and engagement, using data to identify “flight risks”, and taking steps to improve employee retention.

If you're interested in learning how Sparkbay can help you retain your talent, you can click here for a demo.