The Leader's Guide to Understanding Your Workforce

Turnover, burnout, low morale, and training that doesn't stick often grow out of the same working conditions

Turnover, burnout, low morale, and training that doesn't stick often grow out of some of the same working conditions: how people are supervised, how much work they carry, how fairly they're treated, and whether they can see a way to grow where they are.

Many organizations respond to each one separately, with a retention plan for the people who are leaving, a wellness program for the people who are exhausted, an event or an award for morale, and another workshop when performance slips. Each response makes sense on its own terms. Taken together, they can add up to four efforts aimed at four symptoms while the conditions underneath them stay where they were.

Outside research points to the overlap. When the Pew Research Center asked U.S. workers who quit a job in 2021 why they left, majorities named low pay (63 percent), no opportunities for advancement (63 percent), and feeling disrespected at work (57 percent), and 39 percent cited working too many hours.

A Gallup study of nearly 7,500 full-time employees identified five main causes of burnout: unfair treatment at work, an unmanageable workload, unclear roles, a lack of communication and support from managers, and unreasonable time pressure.

The World Health Organization describes burnout as the result of chronic workplace stress that hasn't been successfully managed, and it reserves the term for experiences at work. How people are treated and how much work they carry appear on both lists, and conditions like supervision and room to grow are the kind that can feed more than one of these problems at once.

None of this means the four always share a cause. Sometimes people leave because the pay is below market, and sometimes a team does lack a skill it needs. The claim here is narrower, and more useful for a leader deciding what to do: before treating these as four unrelated problems, find out whether they're connected in your organization, and how. That's what understanding your workforce means in practice.

Turnover, burnout, and low morale are outcomes, and the useful question is what is producing them

Turnover, burnout, and low morale are outcomes of how people are experiencing their work, so the useful question about each is what's producing it, and for whom. A turnover rate tells an organization what happened. It rarely explains why. An employer can know how many people left last year without knowing whether they left because of pay, scheduling, supervision, workload, advancement, workplace culture, communication, unclear expectations, transportation, childcare, or something else entirely.

An overall number can also hide important differences. Employees in one department, shift, facility, role, demographic group, or stage of employment may be having a very different experience from everyone else, and an average smooths that difference away.

A rate that looks acceptable for the whole organization can sit on top of one shift where new hires rarely make it through their first months, or one group of employees who leave sooner than anyone else. When younger and newer immigrant employees leave first, the pattern can look exactly like that.

Knowing what turnover is costing you helps make the case for looking into it. The cost tells you how much is at stake, though, and says nothing about what to change, which is why the turnover pages in this library start with why good employees keep leaving when the pay is competitive.

Those questions apply as much to burnout and morale as to turnover. Each one moves a leader from a number to the conditions behind it, which is where an organization can act.

Employees and supervisors can explain much of what workforce records only count

Employees and supervisors can explain much of what workforce records only count, because the people closest to the work see the day-to-day realities that a turnover rate or an absence total leaves out. Surveys, interviews, focus groups, administrative data, and organizational measures become much more useful when they're used together.

What each group can tell you

• People who stay can tell you what's working and what keeps them.
• People who leave can identify the friction points that wore them down.
• Supervisors see challenges that executives may not.
• Employees at different levels experience the same policies and practices differently, and can say how.

What people say depends on whether they feel able to say it. Employees answer candidly when the questions are relevant to their work, when they trust that their answers can't be traced back to them, and when they have seen feedback lead somewhere before. Asking good questions, and creating conditions where people can answer honestly and completely, is a skill, and it's the heart of finding out what your employees need.

When the experiences in question involve supervisors, leadership, or workplace culture, employees may be more candid with someone outside the organization, which is one of the situations where bringing in outside help is worth considering.

The relationship between employees and their supervisors deserves particular attention. It influences people's sense of belonging, their motivation, their sense that they have some say in their work, their wellbeing, and their willingness to stay. Supervisors in turn need preparation and support, especially those promoted into management for being good at their own work, who are then expected to lead people without having been taught how.

Look for strengths as carefully as problems. Understanding what makes employees stay can be just as important as understanding why they leave, because an organization that knows what it's doing well can protect it and build on it. An assessment that only catalogs complaints leaves out what's worth protecting.

Checking whether a workforce change helped tells you what to keep, adjust, or stop

Checking whether a workforce change helped tells you whether to keep it, adjust it, or try something different, and it starts with being specific about what the change was meant to improve. A more useful question than whether employees liked the changes is whether the changes improved the outcomes you were trying to improve. Those are different questions, and an organization can answer yes to the first and no to the second.

Once the intended outcome is named, three questions do most of the work.

Questions to ask about any workforce change

1. Did the outcome the change was meant to improve get better?
2. For which employees, and in which departments, shifts, or roles?
3. What else was happening in the organization at the same time?

For example, a new schedule introduced in the same season as a pay increase and a new supervisor makes it hard to credit any one of them, and an honest reading says so.

If nobody wrote down what the change was supposed to accomplish before it was made, you can still learn a great deal by going back to the problem it was meant to address and the records from that time, and by asking the employees it affected what's different for them now. That's how to know whether the change you made helped, even after the fact.

Training is a common case. Whether employees enjoyed a program is worth knowing, and it can't tell you whether the program changed how people work or whether the problem it was meant to address improved. Knowing whether your training is worth what you spend on it means weighing that change against the full cost, including the time people spent away from their jobs.

Whatever you find, tell employees. A change that helped some employees and not others, or helped less than hoped, is still information leaders can use, and sharing it shows employees that their feedback led somewhere. When the audience is your own leadership team, showing leadership the work is worth continuing is a separate task from finding out.

Understanding your workforce means treating its problems as connected questions about your people

Understanding your workforce means treating turnover, burnout, low morale, and training that doesn't stick as connected questions about how people are experiencing their work, and finding out what's producing them before choosing a response. Start from the decision you need to make and what you already know. Look across departments, shifts, roles, and groups, because the average hides the differences that matter.

Ask employees and supervisors in a way that lets them answer honestly, and look for what's working as carefully as for what isn't. Then respond.

Decide what will change and who's responsible for it, explain what can't change and why, and work with employees on the pressure that remains. Check whether the change improved what it was meant to improve, and tell people what you found. Working this way can mean fewer efforts, each aimed at a condition you understand, and employees who have seen their feedback lead somewhere.

Findings should lead to priorities, conversations, decisions, and action.