panmoe / attrition-analysis-on-the-hr-department

The rate of attrition or the inverse retention rate is the most commonly used metric while trying to analyze attrition. The attrition rate is typically calculated as the number of employees lost every year over the employee base. This employee base can be tricky however. Most firms just use a start of year employee count as the base. Some firms calculate it on a rolling 12 month basis to get a full year impact. This ratio becomes harder to use if your firm is growing its employee base. For example, let's say on Jan 1st of this year there were 1000 employees in the firm. Over the next 12 months we've lost 100 employees. Is it as straight forward as a 10% attrition rate. Where it gets fuzzy is how many of those 100 employees that were lost were in the seat on Jan 1st. Were all the 100 existing employees as of Jan 1st or were they new hires during the year that termed. Hence the attrition rate must be looked at in several views.

Attrition-Analysis-on-the-HR-Department

An issue that every company deals with is attrition. Sales being an especially high attrition function makes this analysis paramount. Sales attrition is a result of several components including unoptimized sales compensation, unrealistic quotas, ineffective mentoring, career-path ambiguity, training inefficacy or just bad recruiting. Hence the ability to slice and dice sales attrition many ways to understand trends and their root-causes can seriously help sales leadership make the required changes to build a healthier more performing sales force.

Numerically analyzing attrition is a bit tricky. This stems from the fact that the base of employees is continually in flux. Every month new hires join the salesforce, some employees are involuntarily terminated, some voluntarily leave the company and some others go inactive without leaving the company like when they go for a long-term leave of abscence. Additionally quality of attrition is important. Let's say two companies of about the same size lose about 25 salespeople a month. Are they experiencing the same problem? What if one company is losing more experienced salespeople whereas the other was losing mostly salespeople only 2-3 months in the company. Both these companies have wildly different problem. The first one may have an issue like their sales compensation program not rewarding top performers enough but the other one may have a recruiting issue since new hires are probably not relating their job to what they were told during recruiting.

There are myriad ways in which we can slice attrition. In this blog we'll list a few methods:

Attrition rate The rate of attrition or the inverse retention rate is the most commonly used metric while trying to analyze attrition. The attrition rate is typically calculated as the number of employees lost every year over the employee base. This employee base can be tricky however. Most firms just use a start of year employee count as the base. Some firms calculate it on a rolling 12 month basis to get a full year impact. This ratio becomes harder to use if your firm is growing its employee base. For example, let's say on Jan 1st of this year there were 1000 employees in the firm. Over the next 12 months we've lost 100 employees. Is it as straight forward as a 10% attrition rate. Where it gets fuzzy is how many of those 100 employees that were lost were in the seat on Jan 1st. Were all the 100 existing employees as of Jan 1st or were they new hires during the year that termed. Hence the attrition rate must be looked at in several views.

Existing employee attrition This type of a view asks the question "How many of my employees who worked here a year ago today have left". This fixes the set of employees you're looking at to just those that were employed 12 months ago. The figure below plots how many of those employees hired 12 months ago are still in their seat over the 12 months. The plot would always be a strictly decreasing curve. Here is a sample graph from a firm.