- Insights
- Staff Retention Report
Staff Retention Report
The Staff Retention Report summarises how many team members started and how many left, month by month, along with your churn and retention rates, average tenure and the reasons people gave for leaving.
It's available to Admins and Managers. The Participant equivalent is the Participant Retention Report.
Where to Find It
- From the left-hand menu, select Reports.
- Under Team, select Staff Retention.
Use the Period filter to choose the reporting window. Pick Last 12 months, Last 24 months or Last 36 months, or choose your own date range ending no later than today. The report opens on the last 12 months: the current month and the 11 before it.
The report always counts whole calendar months. A range that starts or ends part-way through a month covers that entire month.
An exit is only counted once the user is deactivated. See Restricting, Deactivating and Reactivating Users. An employment end date on someone still active, such as a fixed-term contract end date, doesn't count as churn.
Reactivating a user clears their Employment End Date and exit reason, so their earlier exit disappears from the report, including from past months.
Three groups are left out of every figure: Auditors, users still on an invitation who have no employment start date, and deleted users.
The Summary Figures
Six figures sit across the top, covering the whole selected window:
| Figure | What it means |
|---|---|
| Total starts | Team members who started during the period |
| Total exits | Team members who left during the period |
| Net change | Starts minus exits across the period |
| Active staff | Team members active at the end of the period |
| Avg monthly churn | The average of each month's churn rate: exits as a proportion of the team members active at the start of that month. Months with no team members active at the start are skipped. |
| Avg tenure | Average time between starting and leaving, for team members who left during the period |
Average tenure is shown in days below two months, and in months above that.
The Chart
Below the figures, two charts show the trend month by month:
- Starts and Exits plots each month's starts as bars above the line and exits as bars below it.
- Active Staff plots the number of team members active at the end of each month.
Read together, they show whether headcount is moving because of hiring or because of departures.
Retention Cohorts
The Retention Cohorts table follows each intake as a group. Each row is the team members who started in a given month: Cohort is that month and Staff is how many started. The Month 0, +1m, +2m columns onwards show the percentage of that group still employed in each month that followed. A team member stops counting as employed from the month they exit.
Reading across a row tells you how long a particular intake stayed. Reading down a column compares intakes at the same age - which is how you spot whether retention is improving over time.
Exit Reasons
The Exit Reasons table counts the exits in the period by the reason chosen when each team member was deactivated, highest count first. Exits with no reason recorded are grouped under Not recorded.
Reasons come from the list at Settings → Users - see Users Settings. The reason and any exit details are captured on the deactivation screen, and can be corrected afterwards from the user's profile.
Monthly Breakdown
The final table gives the underlying numbers per month:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Month | The month being reported |
| Starts | Team members who started that month |
| Exits | Team members who left that month |
| Active at Start | Team members active at the start of the month |
| Active at End | Team members active at the end of the month |
| Net Change | Starts minus exits for that month |
| Churn Rate | Exits as a proportion of the team members active at the start of the month |
| Retention Rate | The proportion of team members active at the start of the month who were still active at the end |
Month, Starts, Exits, Net Change, Churn Rate and Retention Rate can each be sorted.
Dashes mean different things by column:
- Starts, Exits and Net Change show a dash in place of zero - so a dash there means none that month.
- Churn Rate and Retention Rate show a dash when there is no rate to calculate, which happens when no team members were active at the start of the month.
Things to Keep in Mind
- Rates are shown to one decimal place.
- When the period includes the current month, that month is still in progress. Its figures include employment start and exit dates already recorded for later in the month, so it is not a strict month-to-date view.
- A user deactivated without an employment end date is counted as leaving on the date they were deactivated.
- The report covers everyone in your account - it isn't filtered to a team, site or region.