I feel like "regretted attrition" is a curiously bad stat to track considering how widely used it is.
On the one hand, it undercounts "attrition we shouldn't have had" by ignoring second order effects that cause people to become "unregretted".
On the one hand, it undercounts "attrition we shouldn't have had" by ignoring second order effects that cause people to become "unregretted".
When I've worked in orgs or companies that have low total attrition (~5%), non-regretted attrition has been something like 1% or sometimes as high as 2%.
When regretted is ~15%, non-regretted will be 5% to 10%. Most of that 5% to 10% wouldn't have non-regretted in a good org.
When regretted is ~15%, non-regretted will be 5% to 10%. Most of that 5% to 10% wouldn't have non-regretted in a good org.
The same things that cause regretted attrition also cause people to burn out and do work that allows the company to call the attrition "non-regretted", but it's only non-regretted if you want to operate a company that sets people up to burn out and lose motivation.
OTOH, regretted attrition also ignores what one might call "deeply regretted attrition", attrition of extremely high impact people.
This number is generally weakly correlated with regretted or total attrition and it can take a decade to recover from this number going up.
This number is generally weakly correlated with regretted or total attrition and it can take a decade to recover from this number going up.
At places I've worked, I track what causes decisions to happen, who's actually making things happen, etc., and there are a very small number of people (on the order of a few percent), who are really critical to the company's effectiveness.
If you read job ladder descriptions, these people do the work that's nominally expected of people who are "senior staff" or "principal" but, as often as not, they're underappreciated and don't have fancy titles.
If a team has one of these people, who then leaves, team effectiveness often goes to near zero, as the person who was making sure the team had a reasonable vision and keeping people's execution in line with the vision is gone, so people do random stuff.
When I ask about how teams that are widely regarded to be ineffective and have been in that state for many years got there, the answer is frequently that the team used to be highly effective, and then some event (re-org, manager leaving, etc.) caused 1-3 key people to leave.
One of the big own goals I've seen multiple times is that someone will decide that regretted attrit is too low at, say, 10% and they'll turn a knob that moves regretted attrit to 15%.
But deeply regretted attrit (not tracked by the company, but I track this) goes from 5% to 35%.
But deeply regretted attrit (not tracked by the company, but I track this) goes from 5% to 35%.
When you crank up attrition, you don't get to choose who leaves and you'll disproportionately lose people who are critical. See also,
https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1397328408669921281,
https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1277591470162104321,
https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1460404836554317824, etc.
When I've asked around about how an org or company got to be how it is, I've yet to hear of a case of an org recovering quickly from this. A very quick recovery would be 3-5 years long, with a decade still being a good outcome.
Most orgs never recover.
Most orgs never recover.
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