What are the four types of employee turnover?

4 of March, 2021

Often, as an HR employee, you tend to see turnover as a bad thing. Some say that high employee turnover indicates a chaotic workplace. That’s not true. Employee turnover is often weighed up against the type of turnover it is. Four types of employee turnover exist. In this blog post we explain you the four types and go over some useful practices to reduce negative employee turnover.

Employee turnover definition

Employee turnover or simply turnover in an HR context is when an outgoing employee replaces a new employee. Higher turnover means many outgoings and arrivals. Lower turnover refers more stability in terms of people working at the company.

Departures though are common, especially in the modern workplace. These departures can concern any reason from the ending of an employee’s contract, to an unexpected death. The response of your HR team needs to be rapid. Using an HR Software is the ultimate solution to control the turnover rate and keep a balance with recruitment activities.  Having a strong HR team with the adequate tools will help your company to keep turnover controlled at all times. Let’s dig into the types of turnover now.

What are the four types of employee turnover?

Because your talent has various ways of escaping your grip and you want to retain as many high performing employees as possible, you often may think of turnover as a concept that an only be negative. This is not necessarily the case as sometimes you may have high turnover but can keep your best performers and consistently perform well.

There are four types of turnover, that cover two dimensions:

• Voluntary turnover. Occurs when an employee voluntarily chooses to leave the organization. The reasons for this departure may vary. Anything from a better job offer to a breakdown.
• Involuntary turnover. This occurs when it is the employer that gets rid of the employee, usually for poor performance or force majeure.
• Functional turnover. Refers to turnover when the employees in question are low performing individuals in the company and can be let go with ease.
• Dysfunctional turnover. Refers to turnover of employees who had big leadership potential but left the organization. These are the worst cases of turnover, and the ones you want to avoid by creating a succession plan.

Solutions to employee turnover

If employee turnover is too high, you can find yourself having to spend too much time training new talents coming in to the organization. Investing in effective onboarding processes is recommended so that you can quickly recruit to replace any departing employees. Sesame HR is a human resources software that can help with that issue. Its onboarding software fits any company and allows HR teams to create checklists of tasks to introduce new employees in a simple and effective way.

If employee turnover is too low, you may be hanging on to poor performing employees, who would be served better if they moved out.

Did this information help you? We hope so. To learn more about human resources software, templates or useful guides, stay in our blog section.