You shouldn't wait until an employee resigns to think about turnover. A proactive approach to reducing turnover helps you put practices in place to keep top performers around, so you're not scrambling when someone gives notice.
Disconnected HR systems make this more difficult. With bits and pieces of people data scattered throughout your tool stack, it’s hard to identify the causes of turnover at your organization and put in strategies to address them. Integrated HR technology, whether it’s a stack of connected tools or an all-in-one platform, connects employee engagement, employee performance, manager enablement, and employee experience into a holistic picture that gives you better visibility into the root cause of turnover and a path towards addressing it.
Here’s how.
Key Takeaways
- Connected HR data provides a more complete view of the employee experience.
- Engagement, performance, and manager signals can reveal retention risks earlier.
- HR technology must lead to meaningful action rather than more disconnected reporting.
- Strong managers remain essential to improving employee retention.
Why reducing employee turnover requires a connected approach
Employee turnover is costly. Not only does replacing an employee cost between half and twice their salary, according to Gallup, but there are other costs that can easily go unseen. Turnover often leads to declines in productivity, especially if it’s unexpected. Team morale can take a hit when a valued coworker leaves. Institutional knowledge, the role-specific information employees know but rarely document, often disappears with turnover. But turnover is a complex phenomenon, tied to several potential causes, such as:
- Poor manager relationships
- Low engagement
- Limited development opportunities
- Burnout
- Lack of recognition
- Unclear expectations
With so many factors affecting turnover, it can be tough to track their impact unless you ask employees directly when they leave. Most organizations use isolated HR systems that track individual factors but don’t give a holistic view on turnover.
Reactive vs. proactive retention
In most organizations, turnover is addressed reactively, meaning you’re responding to warning signs after they’ve already led to resignations. Proactive retention—identifying and acting on problems before they lead to turnover—can lead to better results. But this kind of retention requires a significant amount of data on employees, which disconnected HR systems can’t deliver.
How integrated HR technology supports employee retention
Integrated HR technology uses a network of connected systems to give you a more complete view of the employee lifecycle, from recruitment to parting ways. This kind of technology pulls the data your workforce is already generating, from feedback on pulse surveys to performance reviews, and turns it into patterns and insights you can act on.
Integration isn’t just about using multiple HR tools; it’s about making sure data flows smoothly between them. That’s key to people analytics, which gives you the information you need to be proactive. Here’s how that works.
Creates a complete view of employee experience
Integrated HR systems centralize data from multiple HR tools in a single view. That includes data like:
- Employee performance trends
- Manager interactions
- Goal progress
- Employee recognition
- Development opportunities
With this holistic view of the employee experience, you get a better understanding of what causes turnover at your organization.
Identifies retention risks earlier
Proactive retention means detecting potential risks before they lead to actual turnover. With integrated HR systems, you can spot these warning signs earlier. Warning signs like:
- Declining engagement
- Inconsistent manager check-ins
- Limited recognition
- Unclear goals
- Reduced feedback participation
Detecting these signs early allows you to have conversations with employees earlier, offering support before they put in their notice.
Gives managers actionable insights
Connected HR data doesn’t just lead to a holistic view or a better grasp on warning signs of turnover. It gives managers insights that become clear paths to action. Data gives them ways to identify employees that might be at risk of leaving, tells them why employees leave, and shows the results of their interventions in near real-time.
A framework for using HR technology to reduce employee turnover
Understand why employees leave
To address employee turnover proactively, you need to know why people leave. That means combing through past departures to review patterns for specific teams, managers, roles, locations, and seniority levels.
Quantitative data from engagement surveys, stay interviews, and exit interviews can give you a broad look at these patterns, while qualitative, open-ended feedback can give you more detail on the trends you find.
Connect engagement and performance data
From trends, you can start building relationships between the patterns you see and the turnover levels at your organization. You use performance management software to do this by comparing employee engagement signals with:
- Goal progress
- Feedback frequency
- Recognition
- Performance conversations
- Manager support
Equip managers to act
The breadth of data available in integrated HR tools can be a great asset to managers. But if delivered in the wrong way, it can be overwhelming. Instead of giving managers access to massive dashboards, encourage them to pull their own data from regular:
- 1-on-1 meetings
- Coaching conversations
- Goal discussions
- Recognition
- Career-development conversations
Manager enablement is another essential part of this. Provide training so managers can learn how to better analyze performance data, better respond to employee feedback, and give the right support at the right time.
Create targeted retention strategies
With a wealth of employee data, you can be more proactive about preventing turnover by building specific strategies for the patterns you find. Examples of these strategies include:
- Improving manager coaching
- Clarifying goals
- Expanding development opportunities
- Addressing burnout
- Increasing recognition
- Strengthening communication
Organization-wide strategies might work for some causes of turnover, but they’re not always a fit for team-specific patterns. Deeper data means you can tailor your strategies to specific teams.
Measure progress and adjust
With integrated HR technology, you can measure the impact of your retention strategies over time, adjusting your approach. Metrics you should measure include:
- Employee turnover rates
- Engagement trends
- Manager effectiveness
- Feedback participation
- Goal progress
- Internal mobility
Employee retention efforts shouldn’t just be a one-time reaction to a spike in turnover. It’s an ongoing process.
What HR leaders should look for in integrated HR technology
Integrated HR technology needs to meet a few characteristics in order to actually support your efforts in proactively reducing employee turnover.
Connected employee data
Look for systems that can integrate natively with the platforms you use for employee engagement, employee performance, goal tracking, and manager enablement. That might mean multiple tools that allow data to move seamlessly between them or a single platform that centralizes all these functions. Either way, you should be able to reduce your reliance on manual spreadsheets and disconnected reports.
Actionable reporting
Reports shouldn’t just dump data in a spreadsheet; they should lead to concrete action. That might be through highlighting problematic patterns, automatically suggesting follow-up action steps, or having built-in enablement to improve data literacy in your teams.
Manager-friendly tools
Managers aren’t data analysts, and they shouldn’t have to be in order to contribute to retention efforts. Integrated HR tools should support managers in accessing and using insights in their regular day-to-day responsibilities, like 1-on-1s, feedback, goal tracking, coaching, and employee recognition.
Responsible data use
Integrated HR tools should have built-in methods for protecting sensitive data. They should limit access to sensitive employee information and maintain confidentiality where necessary. HR tools should be used to improve employee experiences, not to monitor individuals.
Common HR technology and retention mistakes
Integrated HR technology is a step up from a disconnected tool stack and spreadsheets. But that doesn’t mean any tool promising to integrate your HR processes is the right one. Here are some common mistakes you should watch out for, both when seeking out tools and when putting retention strategies into practice.
- Adding more tools without integrating them: Adding specialized tools to track specific employee engagement metrics can cause issues if they don’t integrate with your existing systems. You’ll spend as much time manually copying and pasting data back and forth as you’d save from adding new tools.
- Collecting employee feedback without acting on it: If you’re not acting on the employee feedback you’re getting, the efforts you made to get that feedback are essentially wasted. Not only that, but employees will notice, and the quality of their feedback will decrease.
- Tracking turnover without examining its causes: Tracking increases in turnover can tell you that you have a problem with retention, but it won’t help you fix the problem. You need to identify the factors contributing to turnover in your organization so you can build a better retention strategy.
- Overlooking the role of managers: Managers are the front-line of your retention strategy. They can best pick up on signs of potential turnover, employee engagement issues, and more. Not only that, but they usually provide the support employees need to not leave.
- Treating every team as though it has the same retention challenges: People analytics allow you to drill down from organization-wide turnover trends to team-specific trends. Retention strategies should account for the differences between teams.
- Using technology as a substitute for leadership and communication: HR tools give you better data and better insights. But they’re not a cure-all. You still need strong leaders that can make the right strategic decisions and clear communication to support employees.
How 15Five helps improve employee retention
Integrated HR technology should allow you to centralize data from the HR systems you already use and handle retention efforts, employee engagement strategies, manager enablement, and more. That’s where 15Five comes in.
15Five is employee engagement software, a performance management platform, a manager enablement tool, and more. It also integrates natively with many tools that HR teams rely on, like ADP, BambooHR, Ceridian, Employee Cycle, and more. That means you get all the people data you need for better HR outcomes in one place.
15Five helps HR measure turnover trends and follow employee engagement signals. It helps managers track 1-on-1s, coach employees, and more. It also helps employees give better feedback.
Want to see how 15Five can support your retention efforts? Book a demo here.
FAQ: Reducing employee turnover
How can organizations reduce employee turnover?
One of the best ways organizations can reduce employee turnover is by finding the root cause behind it. That means tracking data like employee engagement signals, performance, progress toward goals, the frequency and content of manager check-ins, and employee recognition. This data can help organizations address turnover proactively rather than reacting to resignations.
What are the most common causes of employee turnover?
Employee turnover is caused by a number of factors, including these as the most common:
- Difficult relationships with managers.
- Low employee engagement.
- Limited career development opportunities.
- Overwork and burnout.
- Lack of employee recognition.
- Unclear expectations and misalignment.
How does HR technology improve employee retention?
HR tools capture pieces of the overall turnover story. Integrating HR technology with either a single all-in-one platform or platforms that can move data back and forth seamlessly gives HR leaders and managers the full picture. It gives you insight into the signals that lead to turnover and a pathway to taking the right action.
What employee data can reveal turnover risks?
Declining employee engagement scores, inconsistent manager check-ins, limited employee recognition, stalled goals, and reduced feedback participation are all examples of employee data that can reveal potential turnover.
How do managers affect employee retention?
Managers have a significant impact on employee retention. Not only is a poor relationship with one’s manager often a cause for turnover, but 52% of employees who leave their job say their manager could have done something to prevent their departure.
Reduce turnover with integrated HR tech
Reducing employee turnover requires a holistic view of the employee experience. In most organizations, disconnected HR tools mean HR teams and managers only get a piece of the picture. Integrated HR tech, whether it’s with an integrated stack or a single all-in-one platform, gives you better data, actionable insights, and paths to taking the right action to reduce turnover.
Want to see how the right tool can help you reduce turnover? Get a demo of 15Five.
