Turnover Rate

Turnover rate measures the proportion of employees who leave an organization over a defined period — calculated by dividing the number of separations by the average headcount and multiplying by 100. The metric's diagnostic value depends entirely on how it is decomposed: overall turnover rate is a summary statistic that masks the most strategically important patterns, which emerge only when the metric is broken down by voluntary versus involuntary, by tenure cohort, by performance level, by department, and by manager. An organization with 15 percent overall turnover may have negligible voluntary attrition among high performers combined with high turnover of low performers actively managed out — a very different and substantially healthier picture than the aggregate number alone conveys.