The Missing $ Piece: How HR Can Ask Finance To Help With Cutting Turnover

Few sentences produce more HR loneliness than the dreaded direction we receive after turnover or engagement reports are analyzed, specifically, “HR, go fix it”. One way to end that loneliness is to ask Finance to help with solutions, especially your CFO.

CFO’s are great partners to find engagement and retention magic because they can tie those topics to dollars. And in many organizations calling attention to dollars makes the most impact. For many of us, our immediate and private response to “HR, go fix it” is concerns about the managers we work with each day who drive employees out or down, causing turnover to go up and engagement to slide. We grouse to ourselves about why executives can’t see that the problem is there, not here. Why don’t they act on those poor-performing leaders?

Engaging Finance into the fight can help you tie mangers’ engagement and retention results to dollars and bottom lines, the language of CEOs. Using turnover as our example, while percentages matter and benchmarks, too, in the eyes of some, once the CFO says, “Turnover is costing us $2.4 million dollars this year and going up. Let’s see which managers are costing us the most.” It changes the perception from data to dollars and from low performance managers to costing us money managers.

Take a low-ball estimate for each turnover loss, let’s say $4,000, and multiply it times the total number of employees who leave in a year. In a company of 500 employees with 25% turnover, that total reaches $500,000. CFOs will know where that fits on your overall list of expenses. I’m guessing no lower than third, maybe after salaries/benefits and cost of goods. But imagine the impact of saying, “If we cut just 5% off our 25% turnover rate it would add $100,000 back to our bottom line.”

Candidly, most CFOs bring power that HR can only dream of. Think megaphones versus microphones. If you really want to cut turnover, share this piece with your CFO. Ask your CFO to go to c-suiteanalytics.com/cost-calculator and try our originally-invented and always-free Turnover Cost Calculator. I am copied on every entry and I commit to sending feedback as needed until your turnover cost outcome is right.