How attrition reports help us hire and keep stellar talent

Sarah Kulhanek is the People Operations Manager at brightwheel. Sarah is a Rippling Wavemaker, a leader who challenges the status quo and finds creative ways to solve problems and drive business impact.

Retention is always top of mind for us at brightwheel. We want to bring the right people into the right roles at the right time—and support them so they’ll stick around. 

Here’s how we gather the data that allows us to keep attrition low and engagement high. 

The problem: Insufficient turnover data

We wanted to cut down our attrition rate this year, but didn’t have the data to help us strategize. We weren’t consistently capturing the reasons employees left the company, which made it hard to gauge regrettable vs. non-regrettable vs. involuntary turnover. Leadership, finance, and HR then struggled to accurately create headcount plans. And without the tools to help us spot trends, we couldn’t fine tune our recruiting efforts. 

While hiring great people is our biggest priority, it’s also expensive and time-consuming. And when we get it right, we want them to stay. To figure out how to improve recruiting and retention, we needed better reporting.  

The solution: Customizable attrition reports

Here’s how we used Rippling’s reporting capabilities to automatically capture better turnover data:

Step 1: Set up a “termination reason” field

We configured termination reasons within Rippling to specify why offboarding employees are leaving the company. In the “organizational data” tab, we created the following:

• Voluntary: Regrettable
• Voluntary: Non-regrettable
• Involuntary: Non-regrettable

We also added two additional fields: one for employees who signed an offer letter but never started work, and one for seasonal employees who leave the company after their temporary employment window closes. This way, we can filter out data related to these extenuating circumstances that muddied the analysis we planned to do.

Step 2: Slice and dice data

Using the “termination reason” field, we can get a detailed breakdown of how many employees left the company within a specified timeframe—and why. We also leveraged a pre-built report that gives us our top-line attrition rate whenever we need. 

But the beauty of Rippling is that we can slice turnover data however we want. For instance, we can also look at attrition by department, tenure, and location.

Step 3: Share reports with stakeholders

After running a turnover report, we can easily share it across departments. Our leadership, finance, and recruiting teams use it to align on headcount. And our HR business partners can spot regrettable attrition trends and revamp engagement efforts accordingly. If a certain department or tenure group is seeing higher regrettable voluntary attrition, that’s an immediate flag for us as an HR and leadership team to figure out what’s going on.

Whoever has access to the reports can look at high-level data in the chart view, click into line items to get more granular details, and even scroll through whole CSV files to see every row of data.  

The impact

Detailed, readily available turnover metrics leveled up our retention efforts across departments.

Higher visibility

Now, we can always pull up our real-time attrition rate and proactively spot trends before turnover gets out of hand. Our HR business partners can see how busy seasons, department expectations, and tenure play into whether our best people stay or leave. If they notice high turnover, they jump in and check whether managers are fully trained, ask if employees are taking full advantage of their benefits, and look at engagement surveys to brainstorm how to better support talent before the trend escalates. Pinpointing problems is so much easier.

Better recruiting

Our attrition insights make it easier for recruiters to find and attract talent that best fits our company culture. An uptick in non-regrettable attrition, for example, may mean recruiters aren’t bringing in the right candidates. They are often tweaking the hiring process to select for talent with a better chance of succeeding long term at brightwheel. 

Smarter planning

The finance team has told us that annual headcount planning, which was once dreaded, is now a breeze. For instance, knowing there’s a 5% company-wide attrition rate means we have to hire 5% more people to maintain that average, or more if we’re looking to grow. Having the big picture trends helps us accurately forecast hiring costs and budget for the year ahead.

This blog is based on information available to Rippling as of December 20, 2024.

Disclaimer: Rippling and its affiliates do not provide tax, accounting, or legal advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide or be relied on for tax, accounting, or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, accounting, and legal advisors before engaging in any related activities or transactions.