Frequent employee turnover can have a damaging impact on an organisations’ performance; therefore, a goal of organisations should be to implement strategies which help to retain staff.
Recruiting new employees can take time and usually there is a large cost attached, furthermore high levels of staff vacancy can have a knock-on effect on the ability of the service to operate and the workloads of current staff.
Information on staff turnover can be gathered by analysing the proportion of staff who enter and exit their roles within the service. Total turnover is a calculation of the number of individuals that leave the staff group over the year, expressed as a percentage. It is important to measure whether the employee remains working in the same Trust, within a different NHS role or leave the NHS. By collecting and analysing data on staff turnover, organisations can better understand:
- Why staff are leaving their roles?
- Who is leaving? For example, are staff from a certain demographic or team leaving more frequently?
- The impact which staff turnover has on the organisation and its employees.
Best practice in measuring and managing staff turnover
- CIPD have created an Employee Turnover & Retention Factsheet.
- The Health Foundation have published the following paper exploring trends in staff retention within the NHS.