HR485 Unit 4 Turnover Analysis Example

Four Homes and the First Year: A Unit 4 Turnover Analysis With Every Denominator Shown

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

HR485: Strategic HRM: Analytics and Business Decision-Making

Unit 4 Turnover Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Gatehouse Memorial Group, its locations and every count are composite and illustrative, built on the fields graded in Unit 3; the sources cited are real.

The Total

Over the last twelve months Gatehouse recorded 99 separations against an average headcount of 412, a turnover rate of 24.0 percent. Of the 99, 85 were voluntary and 14 involuntary. The total is accurate and almost useless for a decision, because it averages groups whose labor markets and work differ completely. Hausknecht and Trevor (2011) review research on collective turnover, the rate at which whole units lose people, and show that its causes and effects can differ from those seen in a company-wide total, which is the reason to break the total apart.

Cut One: Function

Location staff, funeral attendants and family service assistants: 61 separations on 186, 32.8 percent.

Care center, removal technicians, preparation assistants and after-hours intake: 19 on 64, 29.7 percent.

Licensed funeral directors: 7 on 58, 12.1 percent.

Pre-need counselors: 6 on 44, 13.6 percent.

Cemetery grounds and office support: 6 on 60, 10.0 percent.

Two functions carry the rate. Location staff alone produce 61 of the 99 departures, so the next cut stays inside that group.

Cut Two: Tenure, Location Staff Only

Under one year: 39 of the 61 departures, 63.9 percent.

One to three years: 13, or 21.3 percent.

Three years or more: 9, or 14.8 percent.

Nearly two thirds of location departures happen inside the first year. That points toward hiring and the first months on the job rather than toward long-service staff.

Why the First Year Matters Here

First-year concentration is common in hourly service work, but its size at Gatehouse is worth stating plainly. If 39 of 61 location departures come from people with less than a year of service, then most of the money Gatehouse spends on recruiting and training location staff is spent on people who leave before the training pays back. The meta-analysis by Rubenstein et al. (2018) found that shorter tenure is among the stronger predictors of voluntary turnover across many studies, so the pattern is expected; what the analysis needs to find out is whether Gatehouse's first-year losses are larger in some places than others. Funeral work adds a reason the first months are hard. New attendants meet grieving families in their first week, take night removal calls within a month and work visitations on evenings and weekends, so the gap between what the job advertisement describes and what the job asks for can open quickly. That is a hypothesis for later units, not a finding, and it would apply at every home rather than at four of them.

Cut Three: Location

Four of the 21 funeral homes hold 52 of the 186 location staff, 28.0 percent. They produced 31 of the 61 location departures, a rate of 59.6 percent. The other seventeen homes, with 134 location staff, produced 30, a rate of 22.4 percent.

Four homes with just over a quarter of the location staff produced just over half of the location departures, and the company-wide rate had hidden them inside an average.

Single-home rates need care. The smallest of the four high-loss homes has eleven location staff, so each departure there moves its rate by about nine points. The finding rests on the four together, not on any one home's figure.

Involuntary Exits

Involuntary separations stay in every total but are shown separately so a reader can see they do not drive the pattern. Of the 31 departures at the four homes, 3 were involuntary; of the 30 at the other seventeen, 5 were. Counting voluntary exits only, the four homes run at 53.8 percent against 18.7 percent elsewhere. The gap holds.

What the Pattern Does Not Show

The counts locate the problem; they do not explain it. Two explanations are already circulating. All four high-loss homes received new location managers during the year. Three of the four are also within a short drive of a fulfillment center that opened last spring and is hiring at a higher starting wage. Both explanations fit the counts, and the counts cannot choose between them, because the two conditions overlap at three of the four homes. Unit 3 also ruled that findings by manager must wait for a manager history taken from the position table, so the manager explanation has to wait for that repair before anyone can test it.

Hom et al. (2017) warn against treating a pattern in turnover as evidence of its cause. The evidence that could settle this one is specific: the rebuilt manager history, a required question on whether the leaver named a new employer, and the timing of departures relative to the fulfillment center's hiring events.

Summary for the Next Units

Location staff turnover is concentrated in the first year and in four homes. The cost of a first-year departure, the subject of Unit 5, is therefore the figure that matters most, and any response should be tested at the four homes before it is spread to all 21.

References

Hausknecht, J. P., & Trevor, C. O. (2011). Collective turnover at the group, unit, and organizational levels: Evidence, issues, and implications. Journal of Management, 37(1), 352-388. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206310383910

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530-545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103

Rubenstein, A. L., Eberly, M. B., Lee, T. W., & Mitchell, T. R. (2018). Surveying the forest: A meta-analysis, moderator investigation, and future-oriented discussion of the antecedents of voluntary employee turnover. Personnel Psychology, 71(1), 23-65. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12226