Earn less? Work more overtime? Use data analysis to uncover the real reasons why employees leave!

Under the current situation, various strange phenomena emerge one after another. This article describes the complexity and variability of the current corporate employment environment, and uses data to analyze the reasons for employee resignation, providing corporate HR with a quantitative analysis method for employee resignation risks.

Everyone has seen the general environment this year, and all kinds of strange phenomena have emerged one after another: some companies are laying off employees while recruiting, but the cost of new hires is higher. Some companies think that the general environment is not good and employees should work harder to keep their jobs, but people are leaving more...

Can human resource issues be analyzed using data? Of course, and it is more accurate than subjective judgment. Today, let’s talk about employee resignation.

1. Resignation from a data perspective

It is normal for employees to leave their jobs, so simply calculating the number of employees leaving or the percentage of employees leaving is actually meaningless. What we should pay attention to are the key departures that will affect income and push up labor costs:

• The salesperson ran away with the big customer, and the order was gone.
• The core developers deleted the database and ran away, the project delivery was delayed, and the payment could not be returned.
• Refusing to raise the salary of experienced employees, only to find that the same level of employees is more expensive in the market
• The hardworking old ox was driven away by the new boss, the new recruits were unstable, and they were replaced back and forth.
• …

Faced with these complex situations, many companies will directly ask: "Why did you leave?" Everyone knows that, except for a few very dissatisfied people who will complain about everything, most people will just say polite words, and it is difficult to get any direct answers. At this time, you have to look at the data. However, the first thing to look at is not a certain indicator, but the employee label.

2. Understand the differences between different positions

People in different departments have completely different motivations for leaving:

• Sales Department: Those who are too capable are easily poached by competitors, while those who are too incompetent cannot make any money at all. Both types will leave.
• Marketing/Development/Operations: Experienced people are in high demand in the market, and salaries increase with experience. It is very likely that people will see better options out there.
• Human Resources/Administration/Finance: The market price of these departments is relatively stable, but the workload varies. Since people work part-time everywhere, they will definitely choose a less difficult job.

After clarifying the direction, you can look for data in different categories to find problems.

3. Analysis of resignation in sales department

The sales department can directly view the salary:

• Ranking of cumulative income in the past year
• Number of times the monthly salary exceeded XXX in the past year
• Salary changes in the last 3 months/6 months

This is mainly to avoid the situation where some people have uneven performance, with a big order in one month and no work in other months. In theory, only those who can make money continuously are in a healthy state (as shown in the figure below).

Some business indicators can also play a supporting role:

• Number of major customers/key customer performance
• Continuous service time for a large customer
• Number of newly developed customers/new customer performance

Those who have many major clients and deep relationships with them should pay special attention to the risk of leaving the company. Those who are good at developing new clients are more likely to find the bonus system of other companies more attractive.

The sales department also has a special problem: conflict of interest. For example, a leader may give a high-quality customer lead to his or her cronies, which may lead to dissatisfaction and complaints from others.

In this case, even if the complainant has a good income, he or she will leave. Therefore, if you encounter similar problems, you need to make statistics based on the sales team manager: if a person has a lot of complaints, and he or she happens to have several "hardcore teams" with consistently good performance, then you have to evaluate the value of this manager to the company separately.

4. Analysis of resignations from marketing/R&D/operations

The core issue of these popular positions is: the gap between our company's salary and the market salary. Generally, the salary of new employees who have just joined the company is very low, but after 2 or 5 years of experience, the salary will increase exponentially. Some positions, such as development, operation, and data, have the opportunity to enter large companies. The industry salary difference will allow them to double their salary after changing jobs. Who can resist this temptation?

What's funny is that some companies would rather let experienced employees go and spend a lot of money to recruit new employees at market prices. As a result, the remaining old employees see that their salaries are far lower than those of the new employees, and they are more motivated to leave. This is how labor costs keep rising, a vicious cycle.

It is definitely impossible to completely match the salary of large companies. At this time, a better strategy is to give people who have reached the corresponding qualifications a salary increase that is higher than the general increase but lower than the market price as a retention measure. At this time, some employees will choose to stay. The specific amount to be retained can be determined according to the organizational development plan (as shown in the figure below).

If the company is in its growth phase and needs to recruit a large number of qualified people every year, it can choose to retain more internal employees, thus saving the cost of external recruitment.

Attention! Some companies’ organizational strategy is to exploit the rookie labor force without using experienced people. In this case, there is no need to compare the market salary, because if the rookies run away, I will just hire new ones.

This is when the vision of workers like us is tested! If you find that the company has a high turnover rate, very few employees have 2 years of service, and the salary is rarely increased every year, congratulations, you have joined an exploitative company. At this time, don’t listen to the boss’s empty promises. Get enough experience for 1 year and run!

5. Analysis of resignation of human resources/administration/finance

The market salary of these supporting positions has not fluctuated and is more stable, so some people tend to bully honest people, such as assigning too much work to them, forcing them to work overtime, or sending them to do various chores.

All of these will lead to dissatisfaction and resignation. However, many system problems are not reflected in the data, and can only be inferred through the following side data (as shown below):

• Average weekly working hours of employees
• Number of days/duration of days off applied by employees
• Number of employee vacations used

Especially if an employee is working significantly longer hours than the rest of the team and taking very few days off/vacation. Whatever the reason, you can expect that person to be very upset. This is when you need to take the initiative to pay attention.

Of course, there are some companies that just like to have an overtime culture. The boss comes to the company at 10 am and does not work. He is leisurely all day. At 5 pm, he starts to call people for meetings, and then everyone works overtime until 12 o'clock at night. This tests the degree of myocardial strain of workers like me. If you feel chest tightness, palpitations, or angina, run away quickly. Staying alive is important!

The above is a simple idea for resignation analysis. Of course, employee behavior data, such as overtime, time off, and bonus calculation, also need digital system support. If the company's HRIS system is not powerful enough and the data is missing, there is nothing you can do.

Here are three more detailed analyses:

First: How to configure a reasonable personnel structure and control labor costs based on the company's performance

Second: For talented people, how to keep their salaries incentive and prevent other companies from poaching them.

Third: For those who have no skills, how to improve the recruitment screening rate and choose methods that can recruit more capable people.

Author: Down-to-earth Teacher Chen

Source: WeChat public account "Down-to-earth Teacher Chen"