High Employee Turnover is a Symptom. Here’s How to Figure Out What’s Behind it.
People are leaving.
You can see it in the turnover numbers, and you hear about it when you talk to managers. The people who stayed are stretched thin, and recruiting is taking up more time than it used to.
You know something has to change, and you feel like it’s on you to change it quickly. So you start looking at solutions. Better pay? More flexibility? Better manager training? More opportunities for career development? A new engagement program?
Any of these could be the right move, as long as it addresses the reason people are actually leaving. That's the catch. High turnover tells you something is happening in your organization, but it doesn’t tell you why. And if you act on the wrong explanation, you can spend a lot of time, money, and employee goodwill fixing something that was never the problem.
It’s also unsettling not to know. You have theories, your managers have theories, and so does everyone else you speak to, but nothing you've seen really explains it. That's a hard place to make decisions from.
So before you ask, "How do we improve retention?", try asking this instead: Do we actually understand why our people are leaving?
Leaders often see the problem differently than the employees who walk out the door. And the reasons people give for leaving can change over time. National studies and benchmarks are useful for generating hypotheses and giving you context, but they can't explain what's going on inside your particular organization. Knowing why people leave jobs in general doesn't tell you why your people are leaving.
Search for reasons employees quit and you'll find a long list: workload, management, pay and benefits, limited growth, work-life balance, lack of recognition, culture problems, tense relationships with leaders. This list is a good reminder that turnover has many possible causes. It just can't tell you which ones apply to you. Pay might matter. So might an employee’s relationship with a manager, or how they feel about their workload, their possibilities for advancement, or some mix of all of these. The reasons can even differ from one department or role to the next.
That's why a good retention strategy doesn't start by trying to fix every possible cause. It starts by working out what you need to understand.
What might be underneath the turnover you can see?
When someone decides to leave, it’s usually related to how they perceive the work itself, relationships with managers and coworkers, how the organization runs, changes they’ve experienced along the way, the level of trust, and whether they feel all of these things align with their expectations. Sometimes it has nothing to do with work at all.
All of these things above interact with each other. A heavy workload feels different when you also feel unsupported by your manager. A change in responsibilities hits harder when you already feel stuck. A pay complaint lands differently once trust in leadership has worn away.
Personal circumstances count too: a change in career goals, family needs, health, a move, a new stage of life. Not every departure is the organization's doing, and not every departure can or should be prevented.
What looks like a resignation is often just the last visible moment in a much longer story. Your job isn't to guess which story you're looking at. It's to actually find out.
I know how hard that can be when your data only tells part of the story. Employee experiences are complex, organizational problems rarely have a single cause, and the most important perspectives aren't always the easiest ones to hear. My background in organizational and qualitative research taught me how to make sense of that complexity, without rushing toward a quick fix. My role is to help leaders ask the right questions, hear perspectives they may be missing, and spot the patterns that explain what's happening and why. And you can start doing that before you collect any more data.
Before you try to fix your turnover issue, separate what you know from what you're assuming
When you're trying to explain a problem at work, it's easy to blur together what you know, what you think, and what you're simply assuming. A good first step is to pull them apart. Take what you currently believe about your turnover and sort it out into four buckets.
We know. What does the evidence actually establish? Maybe your data shows voluntary turnover went up over the past year, with the biggest jumps in two departments.
We think. How are you interpreting that evidence? Maybe you think working conditions in those two departments are contributing. That's a hypothesis. It could be right, but you don't have enough evidence yet to call it a finding.
We're assuming. What are you treating as true without good evidence to back it up? Maybe the word from leadership is that people can’t be leaving for better salaries elsewhere because we think our compensation is competitive. It sounds plausible and it might even be true, but has anything you've collected actually shown that?
We don't yet understand. What can't your current evidence tell you? You might not know how employee experiences differ across teams, when people first started thinking about leaving, which experiences weighed most in their decisions, or whether the same things are driving departures in different parts of the organization.
Put together, it might look like this:
We know: Voluntary turnover rose overall, with the biggest increases in two departments.
We think: Working conditions in those departments may be contributing.
We're assuming: Compensation isn’t a major factor because our salaries are competitive.
We don't yet understand: What led people to start thinking about leaving, whether employee experiences differ across teams, and which experiences matter most.
Now you can see how a slice of information about your organization can point you to a problem without explaining why it’s happening.
Check out the evidence you already have before you collect more
Once you know what you're trying to understand, the next urge is usually to go gather more data. Hold off for a minute. You may already have more than you realize.
That could include information from: exit interviews; engagement surveys; open-ended survey comments; turnover broken out by role, team, or tenure; absence patterns; employee relations issues; manager observations; stay interviews; performance information; findings from earlier consulting work, or just the informal feedback people have been giving you.
The useful question isn't whether you have data. It's what that data can and can't tell you.
Some of it may be enough to support a few conclusions. Some of it will contain gaps. Maybe your exit interviews mention pay a lot, but don't tell you when pay became an issue or what else was going on at the time. Maybe your engagement survey shows low trust in one department, but not what experiences led to it. Maybe your numbers show first-year employees leaving at a much higher rate than others, but say nothing about what their first year is actually like.
Those gaps show you where to look next.
Turn your turnover problem into a question you can investigate
Most organizations start with a question like "How do we reduce turnover?" The trouble is that this question already jumps ahead to the fix.
Step back first and ask: What experiences and conditions are influencing people's decisions to stay or leave?
Then use what you already know to narrow it down. For example:
What experiences are influencing first-year employees' decisions to leave?
How do people in Department X experience workload, management support, and opportunities to advance?
What changed in employees' experiences around the time voluntary turnover started climbing?
Questions like these move you away from picking a solution and toward understanding the conditions that need your attention. Once you have a question you can investigate, it's much easier to decide what evidence will help you answer it.
Let understanding guide your retention strategy
None of this means the usual retention strategies are wrong. Career development might be exactly what your people need. So might manager training, a change in pay, or a redesigned workflow. Or your investigation might turn up something leadership hasn't thought of at all.
The difference is how you get there. You're not picking from a list of retention best practices because they showed up on a list. You're deciding what to act on based on what you've learned about your own organization.
At Inquiry Practice, I think about this process in four step: Listen → Investigate → Understand → Move forward.
Listen to what the evidence and employees are telling you. Investigate the questions your current information can't answer. Understand the patterns and conditions shaping what you're seeing. Then move forward with action grounded in what you've learned.
The goal is certainly not to put off action indefinitely. It's to make sure the action you take actually goes after what's causing the problem.
When you understand what is actually shaping turnover, the choices in front of you become clearer. You can focus your organization’s resources where they have the best chance of making a difference. And you can clearly explain to employees why these are the right solutions.
Before you ask "How do we keep people?", ask "What are we trying to understand?"
High turnover deserves your attention, but dealing with an urgent issue doesn't require you to guess. You can start by separating what you know from what you're assuming, looking at the evidence you already have, and naming the questions that evidence can't answer.
You might find that pay matters. Or management, or workload, or career development. You might find that people from different departments are leaving for different combinations of reasons.
You don't need to know the answer now. You just need to know what you're trying to understand. From there you can investigate the right questions and choose retention solutions based on evidence about your organization rather than assumptions about why people leave.
High turnover is an important signal. It just isn't an explanation.
Not sure what you actually understand about your turnover problem?
What Are You Trying to Understand? is a free practical guide to help you separate evidence from assumptions, see what your existing information can and can't tell you, and turn an organizational problem into a question you can investigate.