How To Reduce Employee Turnover with Workforce Analytics

To reduce employee turnover, organizations need workforce intelligence that shows where people are leaving, why they’re leaving, and which retention actions will have the greatest business impact.

On the surface, turnover creates a hiring issue. But when roles stay open, teams lose momentum and managers spend more time backfilling while those who remain absorb extra work. Over time, those disruptions translate to higher costs and weaker workforce planning.

Most companies know this, and it’s precisely why more than 75% of Visier customers obsessively track turnover and retention metrics.

But knowing your turnover rate only tells you the simple fact that people are leaving. It doesn’t tell you why employees are leaving. It doesn’t highlight who's most at risk and where the turnover is concentrated—and it definitely doesn’t tell you what retention tactics could help reduce the churn.

Before you can take any meaningful action to reduce your turnover, those are the answers you need. And that’s where workforce analytics come into the picture.

In today’s guide, I’ll show you how to use workforce analytics to identify the root causes of turnover, model how it affects revenue and productivity, and design targeted retention strategies to prevent it.

What is employee turnover?

Employee turnover is the proportion of employees who leave an organization over a set period. It factors in employees who choose to leave their roles, as well as those who are fired or laid off.

Because of all the different factors that affect turnover, it’s important to look at these numbers in-depth before reporting to business leaders that you have a “turnover problem.”

Not all turnover is bad—as in the case of a poor performer leaving—but the point of employee retention programs isn’t to prevent every exit. It’s to reduce regrettable turnover by identifying which employees, roles, and skills are most important to retain, then targeting interventions where they’ll have the biggest impact.

As John Boudreau, professor at the Marshall School of Business, and professor and researcher at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, explained:

Voluntary vs. involuntary turnover

We can divide employee turnover into two categories: voluntary and involuntary.

• Voluntary turnover happens when an employee chooses to leave the company, whether for a new role, better compensation, career growth, relocation, retirement, or because they’re not happy with their current role.

• Involuntary turnover happens when the employer initiates the separation. Layoffs, role eliminations, terminations for performance, or other business-driven workforce changes are all examples of this.

Voluntary turnover is the kind you’re trying to reduce because it points to deeper issues with engagement, management, career mobility, workload, or compensation. Involuntary turnover still negatively affects productivity, morale, and workforce capacity but requires a different response from its counterpart.

How to calculate employee turnover rate

To calculate your employee turnover rate, start with the number of separations during a month, divide that number by the average number of employees, then multiply by 100.

While getting your turnover number may appear easy, the work needed to actually reduce turnover requires analysis of data from disparate systems. For example, the top causes of turnover in your organization must be determined by looking at various dimensions of teams, managers, performance, promotions, compensation, and more.

Workforce analytics platforms make it simple to uncover these insights, so you make better people decisions and plans, enabling strategic excellence.

What is a good employee turnover rate?

A “good” employee turnover rate depends on the industry, role type, tenure, location, labor market, performance level, and whether the turnover is voluntary or involuntary.

For example, Mercer’s 2025 U.S. turnover survey puts average voluntary turnover at 13.0%, but that ranges from 8.2% in insurance/reinsurance to 26.7% in retail and wholesale. Even by job level, Mercer shows executives at 5.2%, management at 6.3%, and para-professional blue-collar roles at 12.5%. That’s a huge spread.

You have to look at turnover in context. Relevant external benchmarks are a good start, but then dig into your internal workforce data to see where turnover is happening and what those exits are costing the business.

A companywide turnover rate might look fine on paper but hide a serious retention problem if resignations are concentrated among high performers, critical roles, new hires, or hard-to-fill positions.

Why does high employee turnover happen?

High employee turnover happens for many reasons:

• Limited career growth or internal mobility

• Weak or toxic manager relationships

• Low compensation and benefits

• Lack of flexibility or work-life balance

• Inadequate onboarding

• Poor fit for the role

• Lack of recognition

• Cultural issues within the team

• External labor market pressure

The important thing is not to assume one cause applies everywhere, particularly if your company has 100s or 1,000s of employees. Cultural issues and manager effectiveness might be the driver in one department, while poor onboarding sets new hires up for failure in another.

Workforce analytics spotlights those patterns at the department level so leaders are able to target the right solution to the right employee group within the broader organization.

The cost breakdown: Why reducing employee turnover matters

When someone leaves, the business absorbs the costs of hiring, onboarding, lost productivity, vacancy days, manager time, and knowledge transfer. And when turnover is concentrated in high-performing employees, revenue-generating roles, or hard-to-fill positions, the impact is even greater.

Say a role generates $500,000 in annual revenue. In that case, every vacancy day represents about $1,923 in lost revenue exposure (based on 260 working days). That’s before accounting for the time it takes a new hire to ramp up. 

At Experian, a turnover cost model showed that reducing turnover by just one percentage point could create more than $6 million in savings.

Beyond direct replacement costs, turnover also creates a contagion effect. Visier research found that after one employee resigns, others on the same team become 7% to 25% more likely to leave depending on team size.

How to reduce employee turnover with workforce analytics

The right workforce analytics framework should help you develop turnover solutions tailored to your staff and culture. Here is a data-driven approach I recommend:

1. Identify your retention problem.

Determine what’s leading to higher turnover by first assessing what damage has already been done. These metrics help you accomplish this task:

Resignation rate

Surprisingly, it is not uncommon for a single org to calculate turnover in several different ways, meaning there is a lack of ability to compare across the organization. You’ll want to ensure you calculate your resignation rates the same for all departments and locations (if you have multiple offices).

As you dig into the data revealed by this metric, also take note of who exactly is resigning: Is it your top performers? Senior managers? When many of the employees who leave are your best and brightest, they take all their skills, knowledge, and connections with them, putting your organization at a disadvantage.

With Visier, you’re able to analyze turnover and resignation patterns across departments, locations, managers, tenure groups, job levels, performance levels, and critical roles. 

For example, Gore Mutual used Visier to move beyond manual HR reporting and identify a trajectory toward increased turnover in a specific team. With that visibility, leaders could see where retention risk was emerging and take targeted action before the issue became broader business disruption.

Visier’s talent retention analytics also connect turnover with engagement, performance, and internal movement, so your leadership has a more complete view of where retention issues are starting to emerge.

Impact on business metrics

Now you know your resignation rate and the other HR metrics surrounding it. But is your employee turnover actually a problem?

To find out, stay on top of how resignations are impacting business outcomes like revenue. With fewer skilled workers available to do the work, it becomes harder to get the results needed to keep profits up and morale high.

And if these are roles that need immediate replacement, workforce analytics will show you how much it costs to replace each employee. This tells you how much direct financial impact turnover is making.

With a detailed picture of how employee exits affect other business metrics, you are better able to take proactive action to reduce any negative impacts.

2. Look for the causes of employee turnover.

Once you know that you definitely have an employee retention problem, use workforce analytics to dig deep into what’s causing your staff to leave. Examine:

Resignation drivers

Building on the resignation rate, perform an analysis using a clustering algorithm to determine what factors increase and decrease resignations. This data allows you to effectively target and fine-tune your retention strategies based on data (and not intuition or anecdote).

Use Organization Design and Visier Workforce AI to dig into reasons why top performers might be exiting the business.

Here are a few examples of common resignation drivers:

Resignation correlations

Instead of reporting single metrics, find out how resignations are affected by things such as compensation ratio, promotion wait time, pay increases, tenure, performance, and training opportunities. 

When you identify these correlations, you can present people with the information or compensation they’re looking for before they resign. 

Determine who can be saved

As mentioned previously, implementing a one-size-fits-all retention program is the antithesis of strategic HR: not all turnover is bad, particularly among low performers in non-critical positions, but it’s possible to avoid high rates of turnover.

Chances are, many of the employees who’ve left your organization could have been saved. By identifying which retention approaches will have the biggest impact on your workforce, you can successfully reduce turnover.

Resignation segments

By comparing how resignation rates vary across locations, functions, tenure, age and diversity groups, performance level, and more, you gain insight into how different employee populations are responding to their work experience. This insight is valuable in strategically investing in programs that will deliver the biggest results.

For example, manager behavior, well-being, and work-life balance are the top reasons female employees resign. If you are experiencing high turnover with this group, you may start by focusing on those areas of concern.

3. Identify who is a turnover risk before they resign.

Predictive workforce analytics reveal which employees are at risk of leaving the organization before they hand in their resignation letters. They’re the bridge between diagnosis and action.

For example, Visier is up to 17x more accurate at predicting who will resign over the next 3 months than guesswork or intuition, and this is invaluable because it is easier to stop a top performer from leaving than it is to bring them back.

You may not be able to stop everyone, but if you retain even a handful of key positions for more than a year, the savings can be significant.

4. Build and target your retention program.

This is where workforce analytics becomes workforce action. Once you’ve got details on who’s leaving, why they’re doing so, and who might join them in the near future, it’s possible to build a retention program around specific workforce moves instead of broad, companywide initiatives.

That might include:

• Promotion opportunities for those whose resignation risk is tied to stalled career growth

• Proactive compensation conversations for critical roles at risk of leaving

• Targeted development offers before disengagement sets in

• Manager check-ins triggered by workforce signals rather than gut feel

The right intervention depends primarily on what’s driving the turnover, but also on the employee group and business risk of them leaving.

Real-world example: First West Credit Union

After multiple mergers, First West needed a consistent way to understand employee movement across the business. With Visier, First West standardized its people data and reporting, then used those insights to focus hiring and engagement programs on the roles and regions where turnover mattered most.

Those efforts helped reduce organizational turnover by 3.1% over two years and turnover in entry-level client-facing roles by 9.9% in one region over three years. In one region, they were able to cut turnover in their most critical banking roles by 13.6% over that same two years.

5. Measure program progress.

In your workforce analytics platform, track your employee turnover rate over time by department, manager, tenure, location, job level, and role type. Then look deeper at retention among high performers, critical roles, new hires, and hard-to-fill positions. If those groups are staying longer, it’s pretty clear the program is addressing the issue.

You should also monitor leading and downstream indicators. For instance, engagement scores and eNPS tell you whether employee sentiment is improving before turnover changes. And a faster time-to-fill could mean your ability to maintain workforce capacity more effectively is in turn making your recruiters’ lives easier.

Turn workforce insights into smarter retention decisions

Even if you have all the data, most companies have some limitation with either access to that data or trust in it. Most data sources for people analytics function separately from one another, which limits decision-making.

Visier Workforce Intelligence brings data from your HRIS, payroll, ATS, engagement tools, performance systems, and business systems together, then turns it into a decision-ready source of truth. Your team spends less time hunting down answers and more time acting on them—whether that means flagging a retention risk before it spreads, making the case for a compensation adjustment, or building a targeted program for the roles that matter most.

See Vee in action

Knowing your turnover rate is one thing. Understanding why it's happening is where Vee comes in. Ask any workforce question in plain language and get instant, accurate answers backed by your own people data. See a demo of Vee.