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HR executive at an office window at dusk, reviewing turnover data

Turnover is too high. Find out why.

Every resignation has a reason, and most are knowable while there is still time to act. We put the real causes in front of you, in your employees' own words, so the fix goes where the problem is.

Start a Workforce Strategy Conversation See What Your Turnover Costs You

Every organization is different, and so are the reasons people leave it. There is no one fix for turnover. There is the right fix for your causes. We find out what those are, then help you solve them.

How turnover occurs

People rarely leave on impulse. They leave at the end of a chain.

Across roughly one million exit and stay interviews, the same sequence repeats. Each link is visible to the organization at the time — and each is a chance to intervene that a resignation letter no longer offers.

01 · The cause appears

Something changes, and it isn't addressed.

A path forward closes, a manager relationship sours, a schedule stops working, pay falls behind. Most causes are ordinary and fixable. What makes them fatal is that no one names them.

Early signal: a request for growth, flexibility, or clarity that goes unanswered.
02 · Nobody asks why

The survey records the score, not the reason.

Engagement dips a few points. Leaders see a chart, not a cause, and the chart cannot say whether the issue is the manager, the role, or the pay. Guesses get funded. The cause stays put. A stay interview asks the question the survey can't: what would make you leave, and why?

Early signal: the same low score two cycles running, with no agreed explanation.
03 · The quiet search

The decision is made privately, months before notice.

Discretionary effort fades first: fewer ideas, fewer volunteers, shorter answers. The recruiter's call is returned. To the organization, nothing has changed yet. To a neutral interviewer, people will say what they won't tell their manager or HR.

Early signal: a reliable performer who stops raising their hand.
04 · The exit

The internal exit interview is polite, vague, and gets filed away.

People protect references and skip the hard truth with HR. 'A better opportunity' goes in the file. The real reason walks out the door, and the next hire inherits it.

Early signal: 'better opportunity' as the top reason on your exit forms.
What it costs

Turnover is the largest line item nobody owns.

It is spread across recruiting fees, overtime, training hours, lost productivity, and the customers who noticed. Because it never appears as one number, it never gets one owner. A conservative estimate puts a single departure at a third of that role's annual salary — and most of that spend was avoidable.

Calculate your annual turnover cost
33%
of annual salary — the conservative cost of a single departure
75%
of that spend is avoidable: three in four departures are preventable when causes are known
1 in 3
of it happens inside the first year, before the hire ever paid back
A mid-sized example

500 employees at 20% turnover is 100 leavers a year. At a $54,000 salary, that is roughly $1.8 million a year in turnover cost — and about $1.3 million of it preventable.

How Work Institute lowers turnover

Hear the real reasons. Rank them. Fix the ones that matter most.

The same three-step path we apply to every workforce challenge, pointed at the question leaders ask us most: why are people leaving, and what would make them stay?

01 Listen

Ask the people who left and the people who might.

Trained third-party interviewers conduct exit interviews with your leavers and stay interviews with the people you cannot afford to lose. Candid, because it is not HR asking. Structured, because every answer is coded so it can be counted.

The research we use
Exit Interviews  Stay Interviews 
02 Learn

See your turnover by cause, not just by count.

You see which causes drive your turnover, where they cluster by manager, location, role, and tenure, and how you compare with your industry. Exit and stay findings are read side by side, so a reason people left and a risk people are still carrying show up as one pattern.

What you get
Root-cause analysis Industry benchmarks Quarterly trend reporting
03 Act

Put the effort where the evidence points.

A prioritized plan with owners and timelines: the two or three causes worth fixing first, what fixing them looks like, and how to tell it worked. We stay with you through the decisions — and measure again so the trend line is proof, not hope.

How we help you act
Action Planning & Enablement  Workforce Strategy Consulting 

Every study is scoped to your question. Exit interviews and stay interviews answer different questions, which is why most organizations get the clearest picture running both. Where you start depends on what you need to know first.

See the full approach 
Why this works when other efforts haven't

Fair questions from leaders who have tried to fix this before.

“We already run an engagement survey.”

Keep it. A survey tells you that a score moved. It cannot tell you why a specific group of people quit, and employees hesitate to be candid on their employer's own form. Interviews get the reason, in words, from the people who actually left.

How we listen
“We know why. It's pay.”

Sometimes. In our data, compensation ranks well below career development, manager behavior, and work-life balance as a reason people leave — and it is the most expensive one to fix. Worth confirming before you fund it.

See the Retention Report
“Turnover is just the market right now.”

The market sets the floor. Your causes set everything above it. Organizations in the same industry, city, and labor market carry very different turnover — the difference is what they know and what they do about it.

Explore all workforce challenges
Proof, adjacent to the claim

Organizations that stopped guessing about turnover.

View all case studies 
Multi-facility healthcare
25×
return on investment

Two healthcare systems ran exit interviews with former employees and stay interviews with current staff in their highest-turnover facilities. Turnover dropped sharply, and retention improved across the whole organization, not just the facilities in the program.

Read the case study 
Children's hospital
Up to 70%
lower turnover in targeted units

Third-party exit interviews in five high-turnover units pointed to fixable causes, from career ladders to manager quality. As the changes took hold, reasons for leaving shifted from supervisor-driven to personal, non-hospital reasons.

Read the case study 
Regional health system
$942,480
in annual turnover savings

Exit interviews and interviews with current employees surfaced four causes: communication, retirement savings, pay structure, and onboarding. Fixing them cut monthly turnover by roughly a third.

Read the case study 

You cannot fix a reason you have never heard. Ask, and turnover becomes a decision, not a weather report.

The Work Institute belief
The next step

Tell us what your turnover looks like. We'll tell you what's likely driving it.

One 30-minute conversation with a retention expert — not a salesperson. Bring your turnover rate and where it hurts most. You'll leave with the probable causes, what we've seen in organizations like yours, and the research that would confirm it.

  • Scoped to your turnover problem We come prepared with benchmarks for your industry and size.
  • An expert, not a rep You'll talk with the people who run the interviews and read the data.
  • No proposal unless you ask for one If a study makes sense, we'll say so. If it doesn't, we'll say that too.

Book a turnover conversation

We reply within one business day. No automated sequence.

We don't sell or share your information, and you won't be added to a drip campaign.