Your company’s turnover rate is the percentage of employees who voluntarily leave your company in one year.
It’s natural for some people to leave your company each year so a low turnover rate is normal. There are plenty of excuses to be found for people leaving that don’t fault the company, such as relocating for a family commitment, but companies with large international operations have the power to accomodate lots of these reasons and keep your people on your team, thus avoiding the potentially devastating effects on their business.
Somewhat ironically, large companies tend to have high turnover rates. The irony lies in the fact that they are the ones who have the resources to make the necessary accommodations to keep these employees.
The key reason seems to be that large organizations lack the visibility to even know there is a problem, nevertheless understand and solve this problem until it’s too late.
Then again, we haven’t yet addressed the elephant in the room, which is the fact that most people voluntarily leave companies for reasons that are indeed the company’s fault, or at least they see it that way. The number one reason being a lack of internal mobility opportunities within realistic reach on a reasonable timeline.
Many companies don’t have the right infrastructure to assess employee engagement and happiness, which is the first step in understanding what measures need to be taken to prevent employees from leaving.
Remember, we don’t just want employees to stay, we want them to be happy and productive, i.e. do their best work.
Internal recruitment, in other words, internal mobility goes a step further and actually fixes engagement rather than just measuring it.