Comparing Turnover Percents

In his terrific book, “Good to Great," Jim Collins warns against comparing one company’s metrics against another’s because it is easy to justify one’s own mediocre performance if it is the same or better than an average competitor. This great advice really hits home when comparing turnover numbers for several reasons. One is that companies tend to report turnover in different ways, but more importantly it can be soothing to know that your turnover is the same or a little better than a competitor’s when the raw data tells you that your are losing half or more of your staff each year. That’s bad news no matter how much worse your competitors are. These benchmark comparisons also lead to the obvious excuses that stop improvement actions like “We’re doing better than ___ so we must be doing OK”. The implication is that there are no solutions available…and there are.