Workforce Turnover Can be Improved with Detailed Analysis

Ever heard the adage: “People don’t leave jobs; they leave bosses”? That’s a vast over-simplification, says Daniel Ash, chief executive officer of Journeyfront, a hiring platform. He asked an audience at the ProMat 2025 supply chain conference in Chicago March 18 to consider a job where they might have liked the manager, but left the job anyway. Clearly, a bad boss can’t always be the main reason for workforce turnover. “That’s only a fraction of the problem,” he said.

The danger, Ash believes, is oversimplifying workforce turnover on the one hand — blaming it on a single factor such as hourly pay or shift flexibility — or else concluding that the issue is so complicated that it can’t be solved. 

The problem can be fixed, and it desperately needs to be fixed, according to Ash and his co-presenter, Zach Peluso, director of talent acquisition at KeHe, a food distributor. According to a comprehensive study by The Department of Labor, replacing a worker costs 30% of that worker’s annual salary, because of screening and hiring a new worker, plus paying other workers over-time to cover the departed worker, and then training a new worker to the point where they are productive. 

And those are just the tangible costs, said Ash. If you add in intangibles — such as the impact on customer service and sales, or the fact that other workers often decide they’ll join a co-worker in leaving, let alone the company’s reputation as an employer (the “employee brand,” as Ash terms it) — those costs can rise to 100-200% of a worker’s annual salary.

Worse, those costs tend to be spread out across multiple departments, so they can be hard to see; that is, before they hit the bottom line. And, in the meantime, faced with high worker turnover, companies can adopt strategies that