When a good employee resigns, the visible costs start immediately: recruitment advertising, agency fees, management time spent interviewing. But the visible costs are the small ones.
What leaving actually costs
- Lost productivity in the notice period. A leaver is rarely at full effectiveness.
- The vacancy gap. Colleagues absorb the work, and their own output and morale pay for it.
- Recruitment. Advertising, agency percentages, and days of management time.
- Onboarding and training. Months pass before a new hire reaches the leaver's productivity.
- Knowledge that walks out of the door. Client relationships, unwritten processes, hard-won judgement.
Put together, replacing a skilled employee routinely costs a substantial fraction of their annual salary, and for senior or specialist roles it can exceed it. It is simply cost-effective to keep staff in place.
Why people actually leave
Pay matters, but exit interviews tell a consistent story: people leave managers, stagnation and poor working environments more often than they leave salaries. Three factors come up again and again:
- No development. Ambitious people leave jobs where they stop learning.
- Poor management. Untrained managers create friction, unfairness and stress.
- An environment that grinds. The workplace has a real impact on the individual. Job satisfaction is built or destroyed daily.
Training attacks all three at once
Investing in training tells your people they have a future in the business. Training your managers removes the single biggest driver of resignations. And motivational training, done properly, changes the daily experience of work, which is what retention actually is.
This is the thinking behind our Managing Human Resources & Finance programme, which pairs modern HR practice (motivating and engaging employees, ethics, equality and diversity) with the finance skills to see exactly what turnover is costing you. For organisations, we also deliver in-house staff training across every core function.