A Fresh Look at Employee Turnover

TW Lee and TR Mitchell, both professors at the U of Washington, have been conducting solid research focused on the subject of turnover for several decades now.  An article that they co-penned, along with BC Holton and EJ Inderrieden, "Shocks as Causes of Turnover:  What They Are and How Organizations Can Manage Them," nicely summarizes some of their ongoing research:

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, accumulated job dissatisfaction is not the immediate cause of most voluntary turnover.  Job dissatisfaction is a factor, but to focus on it as the dominant cause of most turnover is incomplete and limited.  Instead, we argue that turnover is triggered by a precipitating event (e.g., a fight with the boss or an unexpected job offer) that we call a "shock" to the system.

Retention has always been a stated concern of most organizations, including those same organizations that pioneered that hackneyed phrase that "people are our most important asset."  The latter half of this decade will become known as the era in which the projected labor shortage due to the aging of the Baby Boomers actually begins to be evidenced.   Organizations will have no choice but to take a very sobering look at turnover, and to exact effective approaches for stemming the loss of talent - and that includes more than just the high potentials.  We think that this will be especially true in the retail sector, where stratospheric levels of turnover are simply assumed to be a cost of doing business.