The Cost of Employee Turnover

Sometime during the first 3-4 months of the pandemic, after offices all over the world closed, I thought that a lot of businesses would try to hold on to existing employees and minimize turnover. I also thought many employees would be nervous about changing jobs amid all the uncertainty.

That wasn't the case everywhere, and I was surprised at how much employee turnover occurred in many companies during 2020 and 2021. We had the Great Resignation, where talented employees (and some not-so-talented) found new employment with lots of remove flexibility. We typically have low turnover at Redgate, but more surprising to me was the number of people we've hired in the last two years.

Our gains come from losses elsewhere. It seems a lot of companies have had a bit of turnover, more than they liked.  The costs of replacing a staffer has climbed to an average of USD$57k, according to a recent poll of hiring managers. I'm sure this is a combination of the time and money spent on recruiters and interviews as well the lost productivity of having less people around.

For many of us working in technology, we realize that losing good people is a problem. Often we lose undocumented knowledge about our systems,  those shortcuts, checks, small tasks, not-so-obvious fixes, and more that make life easier. We can feel more stressed about additional work, or even the anticipated unknown challenges we might face. Moral, productivity, and motivation decrease, which creates a snowball effect. Everyone gets less done, which costs the organization more. Either lower revenue, more costs, or perhaps fewer services for those government or non-profit concerns.

With large tech companies letting lots of talented people go, I wonder if we'll see more competition in the employment market. For quite a few years there have been fewer workers than there are jobs. Perhaps that changes a bit in the future, though I still think there are not nearly enough talented workers for the positions open. Good for talented workers as they may have more choices, but also good for less talented workers when companies feel pressure to hire anyone.

Except, what I've seen in a lot of companies is that they don't want to hire anyone. Having a degree or cert isn't enough. Companies aren't going to hire you because you are Azure/AWS/etc. certified. They want tech skills and at least a few soft ones. That creates an even higher cost to fill positions, so maybe that USD$57k isn't a bad number.

To me, what this really means is that organizations ought to look at poor management, both middle and upper, and replace those people. That's the problem in many places, one that isn't easily fixed. Poor culture, micromanagement, lack of support, little-to-no psychological safety, and more contribute to poor retention.

Culture is important and building it is hard. While not everyone will have a great culture, many organizations can avoid a poor one by treating people fairly and ensuring management understands how to do that. If for no other reason than to avoid the high costs of replacing staff.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums

How to create and manage 'stub' objects, in Flyway migrations, in order to overcome build failures caused by circular, or mutual, dependencies between objects in different databases. The technique should be applicable to any RDBMS.

How to tackle database development in Flyway when databases make cross-server references. The technique uses synonyms to represent the remote objects, and local 'stub' objects to overcome the problems caused by 'missing references' when building the individual objects.

This article is part of Robert Sheldon's continuing series on Learning MySQL. To see all 11 items in the series, click here.

Let’s talk about authentication between Azure Functions and resources used by Azure Functions and conclude with many poorly documented secrets about how to use User Assigned Managed Identity.

Up-to-date statistics makes life easier for SQL Se...

Today, I worked on a performance case where our cu...

Today, I worked on a service request that our cust...

Errors 823, 834, and 825 are all related to I/O er...

I had a request regarding how to identify unused i...

+OK

I got a call saying the database server is inacces...

It’s no secret that I like Snowflake. When I say like, I mean that I like some of the different ways that I can find data within other data....

Scenario: We have 2 Azure AD groups (RLS_11 & ...

We have recently received a few service requests f...

Reading Time: 3 minutes Since this is my first po...

There are many different DBA (database administrat...

One of the fun parts of working for a small-ish Microsoft Partner is that you have to take a lot of exams. Some of which aren’t in your direct...

In the next episode in the Azure SQL VM series, jo...

For PGSQL Phriday #004, Hettie Dombrovskaya challe...

Features are great until they aren't. Understand w...

DAX window functions can result in simpler, more e...

ABSTRACT The Power BI December 2022 update included some exciting new DAX functions, that are all the buzz recently. Let’s explore these new functions using Tabular Editor 3’s DAX...

Video by: Reid HavensLearn how to add either dynam...

Using Aggregation Tables in Power BI? Average calc...

A common frustration when sending emails from Powe...

There is a possibility to call cognitive service f...

Licensing in Power BI comes with many options. Und...

Struggling to get dates when using a between date ...

Learn how to unpivot repeated data columns in a da...

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is dig ...

Introduction These are my SQL Server Diagnostic Information Queries for January 2023, aka my DMV Diagnostic Queries. They allow you to get a very comprehensive view of the configuration...

The Mandelbrot set is a set of complex numbers �...

Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) is one of the ea...

DevOps platform warns customers of a "security inc...

This group has found a ton of remote vulnerabilities in all sorts of automobiles. It’s enough to make you want to buy a car that is not Internet-connected. Unfortunately, that...

In the past I’ve written about monitoring identi...

In this article, we will learn how to implement th...

When someone says, “Find all the rows that have been deleted,” it’s a lot easier when the table has an Id/Identity column. Let’s take the Stack Overflow Users table:...

The cuts, which were previously thought to affect ...

The TL;DR version of what you’re about to read i...