Beyond Turnover Rates: A New Leading Indicator of Org Health

Whether you call it good versus bad attrition, or regrettable versus non-regrettable attrition, the idea is the same: not all attrition is created equal with respect to its impact on your organization. Some departures have little to no effect, while others cause things to quickly unravel.

Often, the most valuable people aren’t the ones shouting their impact from the rooftops. They’re the quiet influencers, the ones who build trust, enable collaboration, and make the people around them better. Great managers know this. They advocate for their teams behind the scenes, create the conditions for others to shine, and don’t need the spotlight themselves.

But in a workplace where many are maniacal about visibility and promotion, how can organizations spot those quiet influencers who make teams thrive, especially when the loudest voices often draw the most attention?

The Problem with Conventional Attrition Metrics

Most organizations track basic turnover metrics. While there is some value in knowing what’s already happened, this value is often overstated and rarely questioned.

Take the trailing 12-month (TTM) attrition rate, for example. It is a lagging metric, and the terminations it reflects represent people who are already gone. Yet organizations spend hours comparing that number to an industry benchmark made up of unknown companies that may have completely different business models, growth stages, and role compositions. Much time and money has been wasted ruminating over a .1 ppt increase in attrition relative to a taken-for-granted turnover benchmark.

As an aside, I am generally bullish on the value of AI across a panoply of use cases that are important for organizations’ success. However, I’m genuinely concerned about how easily some accept as fact benchmark comparisons and explanations LLMs produce, which are not given the requisite internal context to generate an accurate story. This only reinforces my conviction that curiosity and critical thinking will always be in style and essential for sound organizational decision-making. It’s important to question everything, and resist the lazy shortcuts that critical reasoning prevents.

Now, what about a regrettable attrition rate? Not only is this a lagging metric we can’t retroactively influence, but there’s also a lot of psychology behind labeling departures as regrettable or non-regrettable. We shouldn’t underestimate the role of ego, pride, and self-interest among managers. Many would rather devise a story explaining why a key person’s departure won’t hurt the organization, even when the individual possesses unique skills and experience that result in a capability gap. This often happens because managers face scrutiny when strong talent leaves unexpectedly. They may be competing for their own advancement and willing to do almost anything to save face and remove a looming question mark over a strong performer’s exit. As I wrote in this article, managers typically see only a fraction of the impact their people have, especially the informal influence within their various communities of collaboration. In most cases, the HRBP is even further removed from the departing employee’s impact so even if they challenge a manager’s “non-regrettable” classification, the manager’s view usually prevails in the HRIS. It’s far easier to justify the narrative: “That person wasn’t really working out; this is actually a positive for us.”

So, how can we move beyond subjective, backward-looking metrics? Why do we spend so much time analyzing numbers we can’t influence? Is this really the best we can do to identify and retain our top talent?

A Better Way to Think About Retention

What if we could identify our key people, not based on a point-in-time performance indicator from a manager beholden to a forced distribution and calibration politics, but through objective data on actual influence and impact? How might this reshape talent management strategies?

Network-based listening offers that possibility. It helps organizations proactively identify at-risk segments and strengthen retention by understanding who actually influences whom.

Traditional listening platforms segment hotspots based on the org chart or HRIS data dimensions (e.g., location, job profile, tenure) but while these dimensions reflect how people are organized in the HRIS, these don’t represent how people actually operate. As a result, trying to drive change through these same tidy boxes will likely prove equally ineffectual. This may explain why organizations often see little or no progress on unfavorable scores they’ve fervently tried to impact over multiple survey cycles.

Influence happens in networks, not the org chart. People in formal positions of power may command compliance, but they don’t necessarily gain commitment. And when well-respected and connected people leave, the impact of their departure is not isolated to the position they vacated. Contagion effects are real, and their power to spread and impact the morale, productivity, and stay intentions of others has been corroborated across many empirical studies. In my experience, leaders tend to grossly underestimate and dismiss the long-tailed effects of the relationships the departing employee built with their team and closest collaborators.

So, how do we know which influencers might be at risk?

It’s well established that one of the strongest predictors of actual exits comes from a simple survey question about stay intentions:

I plan to be working at this company two years from now.

When combined with network-based insights, that kind of signal becomes even more powerful. It lets organizations see where early warning signs are emerging long before attrition shows up in a quarterly dashboard.

Imagine if we spent as much time monitoring the health of our key influencers as we do reporting on lagging attrition benchmarks.

A New Leading Indicator: Talent Vitality Index

It’s time for organizations to start tracking a more actionable metric: Talent Vitality Index.

This metric reflects an index of experiences, perceptions, and intentions among your most connected and influential people. These are the people whose presence meaningfully shapes engagement, collaboration, productivity, and retention across the organization based on their centrality and connectedness in the network. Since these are people who are still active, this insight provides the opportunity to positively influence their experiences and intentions (and effectively, those in their networks as well) before they lead to attrition that negatively impacts your organization. This metric moves boardroom discussions beyond surface-level turnover rates to indicators that can signal material risk to the business.

Attrition will always exist, and some level of churn is healthy. If no one is leaving, that’s a major red flag; every organization makes hiring mistakes from time to time, and some may lose that extra motivation over time to deliver the outsized impact the organization needs to succeed. But it’s critical to identify the key people delivering results and proactively influence unfavorable experiences and intentions before they choose to leave.

What would change if you tracked the health of your key influencers as closely as you track attrition rates?