Hospitality glossary · People and retention
Staff turnover rate is the percentage of your team who leave over a set period, usually a year. You work it out 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, and 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. You work it out 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, and 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