Staff Turnover (Meaning and Explanation)

We explain what personnel turnover is, its causes, consequences and types. The formula for the personnel turnover rate.

personnel rotation human resources — Personnel turnover is the change of employees in jobs.

What is staff turnover?

In the business and administrative field, personnel turnover It is the measure of how long employees stay in the organization, that is, the flow of workers who enter and leave it for various reasons. It is called “rotation” because the people who occupy the positions change but the jobs remain relatively the same.

Staff turnover has different causes and can be interpreted in different ways. There is a necessary and natural margin for turnover in workers, as time passes.

However, when the same position is repeatedly left empty, that is, when it has a high staff turnover, there must be some reason why the workers do not last. Its correct detection, analysis and resolution can strengthen the company's Human Resources (HR).

Furthermore, a company with high staff turnover will notice that it invests time, money and effort in training its workers for the position, and then they leave, so a replacement must be found to retrain. This creates a cycle of loss of capital and human resources that must be studied and corrected as soon as possible.

See also: Human Resources Area of a company

Staff turnover formula

The staff turnover rate It is a calculation that is carried out to know how high or low staff turnover is of an organization or company. Said index is determined based on the number of linked and disengaged workers during a given period of business operations, in relation to the average total number of personnel. This is:

Causes of staff turnover

The causes of personnel turnover can be extremely diverse. Some are personal, that is, they depend on unpredictable events in the worker's life, and others will be due to the company's own dynamics.

In any case, the causes should be sought when the rotation covers numerous jobs or when a single position fails to retain its employee long enough. That is, when people do not want to stay in a company, or the company cannot find the person who will hold the position.

Usually this situation is due to personnel selection problems (the right workers for the position are not arriving), of organizational structure (the position is excessively demanding or impossible to perform) or direct supervision (a boss who fires all his employees), etc.

Consequences of staff turnover

personnel turnover human resources consequences training training — High staff turnover requires constant training of new employees.

Too high staff turnover can mean the loss of material and human resources before the company can recover what it invested in training its employees. In the long term, it means ineffective management of your monetary resources.

Furthermore, this impacts the work environment since every so often there is a new person to get used to and it generates a loss of trust in the employer on the part of the employees. In addition, it allows leaks of corporate information and little sense of belonging.

You may be interested: Organizational Culture

Types of personnel rotation

There are two types of staff turnover: involuntary and voluntary.

Involuntary staff turnover It refers to the departure of workers for reasons beyond their control, such as retirement, dismissal by a superior, etc. It is usually an indicator of problems in the personnel selection or evaluation mechanism.
Voluntary staff rotation It occurs when the worker consciously resigns from work, that is, when he is the one who makes the decision to leave. Obviously in this case the reasons for rotation can be very diverse, but if it is recurrent, it generally indicates some type of failure in the organization, since workers leave for specific reasons:
- The pay is below the market average.
- The work environment is physically or emotionally harmful.
- The work demands are not those planned in advance or are unattainable.
- The organizational structure is not adequate for harmonious performance of the position.

According to other classifications, one can speak of avoidable and inevitable rotation (in the same terms); or functional and dysfunctional rotation, where the first term measures trained and high-performing workers, while the second measures very low-performing workers.

Continue with: Human Resources Administration