Home » Blog » Do you want to know how to calculate staff turnover?

Well firstly, what’s the point in measuring staff turnover?

There comes a stage in most companies when the question arises as to whether the staff are as motivated as they could be.  In a small company you can deal with these things on a one-to-one basis, but when a company gets above a certain size you just can’t get a feel for how good or bad morale is by sensing it.  If your plan is to spend money on taking measures to improve staff morale, then it is important to be able to measure the success of your actions and be able to prove to the board that the money was well spent.  At that point you actually need to start measuring things to find out what is really going on.

Typical measurements to assess staff morale are:

• employee engagement or satisfaction surveys
• staff turnover
• number of disciplinaries
• performance scores
• number of sickness incidents
• lateness incidents.

All these are direct or indirect indicators of how motivated your workforce is.  So it is important to measure them before and after taking steps to improve motivation and attitudes in the company to look for significant changes.  Many organisations take to measuring some of these factors on a regular basis so that there is always a history available and they can look for positive and negative changes.

So how can I calculate staff turnover?

At its simplest you start with the number of people who have left in a year and divide that by your total number of staff to get a percentage figure.  Of course your number of staff will have changed during the year, so it may be appropriate to take a number of staff at the beginning and end of the year and choose a mid-point between the two numbers to get your average for the year.

Some organisations would separate their staff turnover into two numbers: voluntary and involuntary staff turnover.  Since normally when you are measuring staff turnover you are trying to get at the level of dissatisfaction in a company which is causing staff to leave for other jobs, so if you have had a round of redundancies you may want to separate this from the voluntary leavers as it will skew your figures.

If you get into the habit of measuring staff turnover and other similar factors, it will mean that you can spot trends and deal with them before small problems become a major issue.

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