Thanks to Seb and others for putting in the effort to get clarity in this area for the community.
Very briefly before I circle back for a more substantive round of commenting – noting that I haven’t dug into all of the studies that these quantitative estimates are predicated upon, I wasn’t able to find mention of staff “turnover / churn ” or anything of the sort in this report.
If it’s the case that estimates within this report, and/or quantitative estimates within studies that this report draws from, do not include an approximation of costs from staff turnover / churn, I’d be very surprised if they didn’t have at least a noticeable effect on estimates like those found in this report.
I’d imagine HR professionals would care a lot about costs associated with turnover / churn. Anyone who has needed to replace someone understands firsthand how much of a heavy lift that can be, including the shared bandwidth burden of needing to cover duties that trickle onto everyone else. (This often strains multiple people)
My eye test from coaching EAs struggling with various aspects of their job is that a nontrivial proportion of them are often considering leaving entirely. And in fact, some number of former clients of mine have left organizations after protracted periods of comparatively low productivity and comparatively low overall wellness.
To spell out the implications of what I’m saying a bit more, should staff turnover have any kind of meaningful effect on organizational costs, the value of implementing various staff wellness interventions should go up if it improves retention
Seb had a preference for me to include as a comment here. Curious for thoughts!
Thanks for the comment Tee! As mentioned in the post, this approach had many flaws. This is partly because we wanted to rely on published studies on the association between various conditions (e.g., stress) and productivity loss. Most of the studies we looked at relied on self-reported absenteeism and presenteeism (loss of productivity while at work due to lower performance). This means that these estimates don’t include turnover which can indeed cause decreased organizational productivity, emotional challenges, and other costs. Overall, this might mean that this is an underestimate though there are other ways in which the estimates above might be an overestimate. Do you have a sense of how many people this might involve—e.g., is it 0.1% of staff, 1% of staff, or something else?
Thanks to Seb and others for putting in the effort to get clarity in this area for the community.
Very briefly before I circle back for a more substantive round of commenting – noting that I haven’t dug into all of the studies that these quantitative estimates are predicated upon, I wasn’t able to find mention of staff “turnover / churn ” or anything of the sort in this report.
If it’s the case that estimates within this report, and/or quantitative estimates within studies that this report draws from, do not include an approximation of costs from staff turnover / churn, I’d be very surprised if they didn’t have at least a noticeable effect on estimates like those found in this report.
I’d imagine HR professionals would care a lot about costs associated with turnover / churn. Anyone who has needed to replace someone understands firsthand how much of a heavy lift that can be, including the shared bandwidth burden of needing to cover duties that trickle onto everyone else. (This often strains multiple people)
My eye test from coaching EAs struggling with various aspects of their job is that a nontrivial proportion of them are often considering leaving entirely. And in fact, some number of former clients of mine have left organizations after protracted periods of comparatively low productivity and comparatively low overall wellness.
To spell out the implications of what I’m saying a bit more, should staff turnover have any kind of meaningful effect on organizational costs, the value of implementing various staff wellness interventions should go up if it improves retention
Seb had a preference for me to include as a comment here. Curious for thoughts!
Thanks for the comment Tee!
As mentioned in the post, this approach had many flaws. This is partly because we wanted to rely on published studies on the association between various conditions (e.g., stress) and productivity loss. Most of the studies we looked at relied on self-reported absenteeism and presenteeism (loss of productivity while at work due to lower performance). This means that these estimates don’t include turnover which can indeed cause decreased organizational productivity, emotional challenges, and other costs. Overall, this might mean that this is an underestimate though there are other ways in which the estimates above might be an overestimate. Do you have a sense of how many people this might involve—e.g., is it 0.1% of staff, 1% of staff, or something else?