labour turnover

In human resources context, turnover or staff turnover or labour turnover is the rate at which an employer gains and loses employees. Simple ways to describe it are "how long employees tend to stay" or "the rate of traffic through the revolving door". Turnover is measured for individual companies and for their industry as a whole. If an employer is said to have a high turnover relative to its competitors, it means that employees of that company have a shorter average tenure than those of other companies in the same industry. High turnover may be harmful to a company's productivity if skilled workers are often leaving and the worker population contains a high percentage of novice workers.
In the United States, the average total non-farm seasonally adjusted monthly turnover rate was 3.3% for the period from December 2000 to November 2008.[1] However rates vary widely when compared over different periods of time or different job sectors. For example, during the period 2001-2006, the annual turnover rate for all industry sectors averaged 39.6% before seasonal adjustments,[2] during the same period the Leisure and Hospitality sector experienced an average annual rate of 74.6%.[3]abour or staff turnover

What is "labour turnover"?

Labour turnover refers to the movement of employees in and out of a business. However, the term is commonly used to refer only to ‘wastage’ or the number of employees leaving.

High labour turnover causes problems for business. It is costly, lowers productivity and morale and tends to get worse if not dealt with.

Measuring labour turnover

The simplest measure involves calculating the number of leavers in a period (usually a year) as a percentage of the number employed during the same period. This is known as the "separation rate" or "crude wastage rate" and is calculated as follows:

Number of leavers / average no employed x 100

For example, if a business has 150 leavers during the year and, on average, it employed 2,000