Key takeaways

  • Employee turnover is the cyclical process of hiring, losing, and replacing employees.
  • It’s a normal part of business, but a turnover rate of 18% or more is high, costing companies money, morale, and productivity.
  • Companies can improve employee retention by supporting new employees, improving the terms of employment, and investing in workplace culture.
Update notes
  • Nov. 20, 2025: Hanna Sillo improved the article’s structure for clarity and easier reading, added new statistics, expanded examples across all strategies, included an additional callout on pay and benefits trends, and added a new FAQ item.
  • Nov. 3, 2023: Jessica Dennis updated the layout to current standards, added relevant links and a retention rate calculator, and revised the copy for freshness.

6 strategies to reduce employee turnover

Employers can reduce employee turnover through several retention strategies that help optimize the employee life cycle:

1. Conduct exit interviews

HR teams can remove the guesswork from voluntary departures by conducting effective exit interviews to understand what’s actually causing people to leave, so you can fix issues before more employees walk out.

Over time, exit interview data might reveal common themes that departing employees mention. These often uncover patterns like:

  • Culture or workload issues
  • Compensation that’s no longer competitive
  • Ineffective or untrained managers
  • Unclear role expectations
  • Limited growth or career pathways

Combining this data with workforce analytics can uncover more patterns that lead to more effective employee retention strategies. As a result, HR can turn these into actionable points, such as adjusting compensation, workload, or management training.

2. Optimize employee onboarding

Poor or inconsistent onboarding is one of the biggest drivers of early attrition. Most voluntary turnover happens in the first 6–12 months, making the early employee experience one of the most critical retention windows.

Strengthening onboarding—especially beyond the first week—helps new hires feel supported, confident, and connected before they reach the point where early-stage attrition typically occurs.

HR teams can turn to a number of data sources to adjust their onboarding process. A few examples that can pinpoint where new hires are getting stuck are:

  • Help desk or HRIS data showing manual processes or onboarding gaps
  • Exit interview insights about unclear expectations or lack of support
  • Engagement metrics showing low connection or belonging
  • Time-to-productivity data signaling slow ramp-up

If engagement among new employees seems to be an issue, HR team members can help new hires plug into the company culture by introducing them to others in the company through welcome events, checking in routinely, and establishing an onboarding buddy system.

Perhaps the onboarding process is unclear, or many tasks are manual, which points to issues with the software solution or how its workflows are configured.

3. Invest in company culture

Culture is one of the strongest predictors of long-term retention. When employees feel respected, included, and connected, they’re far less likely to leave, regardless of tenure or role.

While fixing workplace culture is a feat that will take time, investing in employee engagement software, social collaboration tools and workplace events helps to set a new tone for the company culture. These efforts, in turn, help boost morale and foster connections that make employees want to stay.

For example, examining turnover data more closely in terms of demographics might reveal that the company culture doesn’t respect and value employees from a range of backgrounds, identities, and abilities.

In response, a company can create or revamp diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the organization by offering:

Regardless of whether a particular demographic makes up most of the turnover, fostering social collaboration and team building helps boost workplace culture and employee engagement, too.

Gallup’s 2025 Sate of the Global Workforce Report revealed that employee engagement fell to 21% when 2024 closed. To boost enagement, companies can set up:

  • Corporate volunteer events
  • In-person celebrations or events
  • A mentorship program
  • Interest groups for employees to connect on shared interests, e.g., Slack channels, book clubs, etc.
  • Avenues for giving and receiving employee recognition, such as in Motivosity
  • Feedback loops through employee engagement tools to identify signs that employees are unhappy

Pulling some or all of these levers can result in returns on employee satisfaction and engagement.

Learn more about how you can recognize employees in Motivosity below:

Visit Motovosity

4. Offer flexible work arrangements

Today’s employees value flexibility more than ever. According to the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans’ 2025 survey, 80% of corporate employers now offer hybrid work options, and more than half of those (53%) also support fully remote employees.

As a result, companies should abandon a one-size-fits-all approach to how work gets done, focus on results, and let employees decide how they work best. This could include offering:

  • Remote work options (full-time or location-flexible)
  • Hybrid schedules with designated in-office collaboration days
  • Flexible hours that let employees choose when they start or finish
  • Compressed workweeks (e.g., 4×10 schedules or 9/80 arrangements)
  • Core hours models where employees must be online for a set window but manage the rest of their time independently
  • Job-sharing arrangements for employees who need reduced workloads
  • Flexible shift swaps for frontline or hourly teams

Providing a menu of flexible work options empowers employees to choose arrangements that best fit their needs that ultimately improve satisfaction and reduce turnover.

5. Develop a (better) benefits and compensation strategy

Low pay and lackluster benefits continue to drive employee resignations. A 2025 Thatch survey found that pay is the primary deciding factor for one-third of employees planning to leave their jobs. The same study also showed that health benefits ranked higher than both culture and career growth when employees weighed whether to stay or move on.

Human capital management (HCM) vendors, such as Workday and Oracle HCM, use industry benchmarks to help a company determine and improve the level of competitiveness in their compensation strategy. 

Analytics in benefits administration software indicates to HR how effective the current benefits package is. For example, employee engagement metrics such as enrollment and usage are good starting points for assessing how competitive a company’s benefits are.

The Workday platform displays a compensation summary table with various departments' compensation data listed by employee positions, total salary and allowances, total base pay, total primary compensation basis, average base pay, average primary compensation basis, and currency type.
Workday allows you to collaborate with multiple stakeholders on a fair and equitable compensation plan, ensuring your pay remains competitive. Source: Workday
Visit Workday

External factors shape employee expectations

Beyond pay and benefits being top turnover drivers, broader economic pressures are also shaping what employees expect. Rising cost-of-living, volatile inflation, and years of wage stagnation have pushed workers to prioritize compensation more sharply than before.

As a result, employees increasingly expect transparent pay ranges, clear salary progression paths, and predictable compensation policies that help them plan their finances with confidence.

6. Facilitate employee training and development

Employees desire an employer that will invest in and support their professional development, so if the employer fails to do so, this could be a reason for turnover. In fact, lack of opportunities for growth and advancement—as well as low pay—were cited as top reasons why people left their jobs in the Pew study.

HR and learning and development teams can create pathways for career development through:

Turnover rate calculator



How do you calculate employee turnover rate?

Turnover rate =

Number of employees who leave their role within a set time frame

Average number of total employees in the same time period

x 100

  1. Define the time period for measuring turnover. This could be a month, quarter, or year, or it could be a time frame surrounding a particular event.
  2. To find the average headcount for that time period, add the number of employees at the beginning of the period to the number of employees at the end of the period and divide by two.
  3. Then, divide the number of employees who left their role by the average headcount for that period. Multiply that result by 100 to arrive at the turnover rate. 

Here’s an example of this formula in practice:

A company has 100 employees at the start of the month and 80 at the end. The average headcount is calculated like this: (100+80)/2 = 90 total employees on average. 

Let’s say 20 employees moved to another role during that month. This is the equation for turnover rate: (20/90) x 100 = 22.2%

Employee turnover FAQ

Turnover, also known as employee churn, refers to a cyclical process of hiring, losing, and replacing employees in an organization. Turnover is different from attrition, which similarly involves employees leaving. However, the key difference is that, with attrition, people who leave are not replaced, leading to overall fewer roles – and thus also fewer people – in the organization.

Employee turnover is quantitatively captured in turnover rate, which is the percentage that shows the rate at which employees enter and leave the company. Turnover rate is usually measured in a monthly or annual timeframe.

The employee turnover rate is different from the attrition rate. While turnover rate measures the rate at which employees leave and are replaced, attrition is captured in a different formula that shows the rate at which a company’s workforce is shrinking over time.

The turnover rate alone doesn’t tell the entire story. The right strategy or combination of strategies to reduce employee turnover depends on the type of employee turnover a company is experiencing. The scope and type of company departures determine whether a company indeed has a turnover problem and, if so, how to best resolve it. 

There are four main types of employee turnover:

  • Widespread turnover.
  • Department or role-specific turnover.
  • Voluntary turnover.
  • Involuntary turnover.

Widespread turnover

Employees across teams, departments, and roles come and go. This points to deeper, structural issues that will take longer to pinpoint and remediate. In this situation, pursue all of the above strategies, but prioritize holding exit interviews (strategy 1) to pinpoint reasons for employee turnover.

Department or role-specific turnover

A particular department or role that’s a revolving door is easier to handle because the HR team can more easily pinpoint why it’s happening, though it can also be symptomatic of broader organizational issues. Moreover, high turnover is expected in certain industries, such as retail and food service. Try strategies 2, 3, and 6 that focus on onboarding, compensation, and manager training, respectively.

Voluntary turnover

This is the most important turnover type to focus on, whether it’s widespread or role-focused. Voluntary turnover includes, for the most part, employees who quit. However, there might be some outliers in this category: for example, employees who retire. Companies experiencing a high employee turnover rate consisting mostly of resignations should prioritize exit interviews (strategy 1) before pursuing the other, more targeted strategies.

Involuntary turnover

Turnover in general does not necessarily signal a problem. Layoffs due to economic circumstances or terminations of low-performing employees are a normal part of the business cycle. Layoffs as part of employee turnover don’t warrant further investigation, as the reasons are usually obvious. However, if there’s a trend of low performers and increased terminations, that’s part of the turnover story that signals misaligned recruiting strategies. Recruiters might need to adjust the minimum qualifications and conduct skills assessments before hiring.

According to the 2023 U.S. Mercer Turnover Survey, the average turnover rate among U.S. businesses between 2022 and 2023 was 17.3%. You can use this benchmark and the Bureau of Labor Statistics current Job Openings and Labor Turnover to understand whether your turnover rates are typical for your region and industry. If not, you’ll need to adjust your recruitment and retention strategies to reduce turnover to manageable levels.

Reducing employee turnover is important to lowering people management and recruiting costs while improving employee morale and productivity. The cycle of hire, lose, replace, and repeat comes to a stop or at least slows down when putting the above strategies into place. The right combination of strategies will depend on the nature of an employer’s particular employee turnover problem. The more systemic the causes are, the more strategies HR teams will need to test and implement.

Healthy turnover happens when low performers, culture misfits, or employees in non-critical roles leave the organization. This opens space for better-suited talent, improves team performance, and can even strengthen culture. For example, replacing a consistently underperforming employee with someone who has the right skills and attitude can boost productivity and morale.

Unhealthy turnover, on the other hand, occurs when high performers, high-potential employees, or long-tenured team members leave—especially from mission-critical roles. This type of churn is expensive and destabilizing. It’s often driven by preventable issues such as low pay, lack of growth, poor management, burnout, or weak onboarding. Losing these employees typically increases workload on remaining staff, which can trigger a cycle of further turnover.

The right HR software that includes robust people analytics can assist with reducing employee turnover. Check out our HR Software Guide.

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Lauren Hansen
Lauren Hansen is a former staff writer for TechnologyAdvice who specializes in HR technology and trends.