Hospitality glossary · People and retention
Staff turnover rate is the percentage of your team who leave over a set period, usually a year, calculated as leavers divided by average headcount, multiplied by 100.
In practice
Definitions are easy. What matters is how the thing behaves in a real operation, and where it tends to go wrong.
Twelve leavers across an average headcount of thirty is a 40% annual rate. Most UK hospitality operators sit a long way above that — 60% to 90% is ordinary for the sector — so the headline number on its own says less than the split behind it. Separate voluntary resignations from dismissals, and people who left inside 90 days from people who stayed a year, and the figure starts telling you where the problem actually is.
Measuring the headline rate and stopping there. A site running 70% turnover where almost all of it happens in the first twelve weeks has an onboarding and management problem rather than a recruitment one, and hiring harder makes it worse.
Questions
Something here that doesn’t match what you’re seeing in your own business? That is usually worth a conversation rather than another article.
Staff turnover rate is the percentage of your team who leave over a set period, usually a year, calculated as leavers divided by average headcount, multiplied by 100. Twelve leavers across an average headcount of thirty is a 40% annual rate. Most UK hospitality operators sit a long way above that — 60% to 90% is ordinary for the sector — so the headline number on its own says less than the split behind it. Separate voluntary resignations from dismissals, and people who left inside 90 days from people who stayed a year, and the figure starts telling you where the problem actually is.
Measuring the headline rate and stopping there. A site running 70% turnover where almost all of it happens in the first twelve weeks has an onboarding and management problem rather than a recruitment one, and hiring harder makes it worse.
WHY Hospitality