Turnover (employment)
In human resources context, turnover or staff turnover or labour turnover is the rate at which an employer gains and loses employees. Simple ways to describe it are "how long employees tend to stay" or "the rate of traffic through the revolving door". Turnover is measured for individual companies and for their industry as a whole. If an employer is said to have a high turnover relative to its competitors, it means that employees of that company have a shorter average tenure than those of other companies in the same industry. High turnover may be harmful to a company's productivity if skilled workers are often leaving and the worker population contains a high percentage of novice workers.
In the United States, the average total non-farm seasonally adjusted monthly turnover rate was 3.3% for the period from December 2000 to November 2008. However rates vary widely when compared over different periods of time or different job sectors. For example, during the period 2001-2006, the annual turnover rate for all industry sectors averaged 39.6% before seasonal adjustments, during the same period the Leisure and Hospitality sector experienced an average annual rate of 74.6%.
Read more about Turnover (employment): Costs, Internal Versus External, Skilled Vs. Unskilled Employees, Voluntary Versus Involuntary, Causes of High or Low Turnover, How To Prevent Turnover, Calculation, Models