UK Employee churn rate is at its highest since 2019
If you talk to any business owner and ask them what is on their mind it’s typically Money, Time or Staffing. There’s a good reason why staff comes up so frequently for the average employer and that’s because they are vital for any company to grow.
There’s also a worrying trend amongst UK workers, which is that year on year the percentage of them leaving their employer for another company or just out right leaving work is increasing.
During the years of the Covid 19 Pandemic this increase might not have seemed too alarming but why is it increasing even further in 2023? Let’s take a deeper look at this together.
What’s going on?
Employers are facing a weird situation. On one hand the Pandemic can be an understandable factor in an increase in staff turnover during 2019-2021 but on the other hand staff leaving tends to lower during periods of economic instability like the cost of living crisis we’re facing now (2021-2023) yet during a period of economic instability we’re actually seeing the numbers continue to rise. This gets even stranger when you go back to the Pandemic figures and factor in that these are mostly involuntary or staff being made to leave due to redundancy and not of their own accord, when you factor that in the figures are actually worse than you might think.
If you look at this article which does a great job at showcasing data found by the HR company Remote you can see that the UK is estimated to reach a staff churn rate of 35.6% by the end of 2023 compared to just 25.8% in 2019.
To see what is driving this trend we can look at the following table
There are certainly a range of factors causing it, but one figure stands out far above all the others. Career Organisation/Opportunities with the highest rates of employers stating high impact and very high impact drivers for their staff leaving.
Training and investment
As an organisation that highly values training it should come as no surprise that we knew this would be one of the biggest drivers before we even researched this topic.
We’ve said before that your team can be a hugely powerful tool for your brand beyond just the tasks they do for you, in fact we spoke about that just the other week. If you invest in them they only continue to add value to your organisation with their improved skills and the improved culture that they will add as an added benefit. When you train staff they become more productive as a result which helps with improving your bottom line and reducing costs from wasted time or resources, in addition if you provide them with frequent top up training in things like digital skills then they lessen the organisations digital risk from human error which can be the difference between a company thriving or being held to ransom by hackers.
Employees that believe they have the opportunity to grow and develop into new and senior roles inside an organisation are far more likely to stay because they see a long term vision with the company that will support their career. One of the single most powerful ways to give your employees the message that they have opportunities to grow with you is by helping them grow into those roles with training and investment.
The other issues to consider
On the surface it seems like the issue is just staff leaving and it ends there. Well staff churn wouldn’t be on the minds of so many employers if it was that simple. There is a number of new problems that arise for employers when their staff leave. Remember what we said at the beginning? Most employers are thinking about Money, time or staff? Well when staff leave it puts pressure on the other two things. Companies often experience a noticeable dip in their revenue since work flows are disrupted and things are being done less effectively and they also have the added costs of finding a replacement, because again not many people consider the costs involved in finding new staff.
If a company uses a recruitment service to save themselves time then on average it will set them back around £3000. If they don’t use this type of service then they still have the costs of running advertisements potentially, the wages of staff to process applications, CV’s and perform interviews. Depending on the industry or role you might need background checks to be done, need new equipment or ironically enough need to actually train them.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that there is a problem with employers across all sectors retaining skilled workers and for a number of factors but there is definitely a trend the suggests one of the biggest problems is that they don’t feel valued or don’t believe there is growth and opportunities for them.
Businesses have a trivector of concerns at any given moment, time, money and staff. When you lose your staff then it’s not just one area that gets hit, everything becomes stressed.
Providing staff with the right training and investment you’ll often see improvements to your bottom line and you’ll build with them a shared culture of growth together which will only benefit everyone involved.
If you want to know about Training and investing in your team then reach out to us. We love talking about it.
