Are Spans of Control a Predictor of Turnover?

November 6, 2023
Richard Finnegan
Articles

Most executives can quote their company’s employee turnover percentage or get close, but there are other metrics in their organizations that impact turnover without ever being accounted for. One of these never-considered metrics is spans of control. Spans of control are the number of employees assigned to each manager on organization charts. The more employees assigned to a manager, the wider their span of control.

Spans of Control is an Issue in the Healthcare Industry

This is on my mind today because we are helping several large hospital companies cut nurse turnover, however this malady is not in any way confined to just hospitals.

But looking at hospitals here, since 2020 it’s been challenging to say the least for CEOs in the healthcare industry. Unfortunately, worrying about hospital staff turnover is well-placed worry for those execs today and tomorrow.

Let’s take data we know from a respected study examining the correlation between span of control and nurse turnover which concluded in part…

“Span of control was the strongest predictor of staff turnover. Units with managers who had a wide span of control had higher levels of staff turnover…The major contribution of this study is its finding that no leadership style can overcome a wide span of control.”^[i]

Sit still for a moment and re-read that opening sentence, span of control was the strongest predictor of staff turnover. This means how much you pay your nurses, how much you recognize them, how much you rethink their schedules…all of the endless number of things you do to cut your turnover or improve employee engagement are in the minor leagues compared to your spans of control. And who is to say this finding is confined to just nurses?

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Further Reading: Precedent-Setter: Nursing Homes Must Report & Post Turnover Data

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Spans of Control Applies to Other Industries, Too

Taking that data on nursing staff turnover related to spans of control, let’s think about how it applies to other industries as well.

As our clients know, we begin each engagement by conducting a cost study for how much turnover costs the organization when employees exit.

Here is a sample of studies we’ve done:

Nurse: $42,131
Truck loader/unloader: $4,955
Call center representative: $29,447
Physician: $225,808
Truck driver: $21,221
Software engineer: $131,290
Forklift driver: $10,742
Manufacturing entry-level: $5,518

Might any of these jobs look familiar to you?

While the average number of nurse direct reports is 74^[ii], certainly a stunning span, the direct report numbers for manufacturing, food processing, and call centers is often 30 and above. In some cases, organizations have inserted an hourly worker as a half-supervisor role in-between managers and employees with job titles like charge nurses or team leads. For our client companies, the true test for whether these in-between, semi-leaders are true people leaders is when we ask if they should be accountable for employee retention goals…and usually the answer is no. So, these roles are helpers but not supervisors, thus not positively affecting spans of control.

Conclusion: Those massive spans of control are just as big and difficult to manage as they look.

This makes sense to me then that the larger the spans of control, the higher the rate of turnover considering that the #1 reason employees stay or leave…or engage or disengage…is how much they trust their boss. How can you trust your boss if you never see your boss? Or as nurses consistently tell me when I ask when was the last time you talked with your supervisor, their answer is, “The last time I screwed up”. That’s hardly a good way to improve staff retention or employee engagement.

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Retention Resource: Cost of Turnover Calculator

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Rethink Your Spans of Control to Cut Turnover

There needs to be a new-found mathematical equation that says (1) if you have high turnover that impacts productivity and (2) you have high spans of control and (3) you have a clue about how much turnover costs, then (4) maybe you should rethink your high spans of control.

So back to nursing, might it make sense to replace your charge nurses with qualified supervisors who can reduce your spans of control by half or more? Even if you have to bump their pay up $10,000 per year, how much turnover can you reduce when each exit costs $42,131 per hit? Or the same with call centers where each exit costs nearly thirty thousand dollars? Even those jobs with the lowest turnover cost on our list represent workers who deserve a supervisor who has time to build a relationship with them.

At some point organizations must decide if all of their employees need the usual individual coaching and the assurance of one-on-one relationships with their supervisors…or if those employees who report to managers with high spans of control are the closest human adaptation of robots who come to work, do their work, and go home…and human intervention only occurs if their work is off track.

Knowing turnover’s cost is the first step to doing the right thing, to rethink spans of control so all employees are given a fair chance to develop a trusting relationship with their boss…which leads to cutting turnover and improving engagement as well.

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