20 Metrics in 20 Days- Day 19: Experience Loss

Day 19 in our series of 20 consecutive posts on HR Metrics: Experience Loss

Definition

Experience Loss is the total amount of organizational tenure lost in a given period as a result of voluntary turnover.

To calculate, you simply total up the number of years of organizational tenure for all the people that left in the period.

Why You Should Care

What’s more compelling?

1. Top performer turnover last quarter was 5.2%
2. 57 years of top performer organizational tenure walked out the door last quarter

The numbers are important but the story is key. People can relate to years of experience being lost.

Additional Considerations

The total years of experience walking out the door matters but the quality of those years is important too.

It therefore makes sense to break down your analyses by performance ratings along with other valuable segmentations.

Losing 50 years from subpar performers is the not the same as losing 50 from your top people.

Many of you may note that this metric is heavily dependent on the size of the organization because there is no scaling or averaging here.

Said differently, a company with 100,000 employees will clearly lose more years than a company of 500. This is absolutely, 100% true so be sure to provide plenty of other context around this number as well (e.g. overall turnover and retention, recent trends).

Telling a better story deosn’t mean sacrificing analytic accuracy and clarity.

Actions

The usual suspects:

• Breakdown your numbers by business area, age, gender, and performance rating to see if any patterns emerge
• Look for precursors/ leading indicators of heavy-impact departures including low or declining employee engagement
• Look for linkages with previous employee attempts to find other internal roles. Might those with multiple years of experience be frustrated with their inability to navigate successfully within the organization?