RG People StatsAn analysis on 14 June 2016

Background

One of our colleagues posted a really thorough review on Glassdoor on 13 June. In it they said everything they loved about RG and everything they thought the company needed to do better or think about.

A great example of an engaged employee displaying our Speak Up value.

You can read it here in full.

Rationale for this quick report

There were lots of great points raised in the review and Glenn our Founder & CEO answered all of them as he always does.

But this point, Glenn wasn’t certain of the answer so he commissioned this quick staff turnover report to investigate so he could answer honestly and correctly and do the question justice.

What is staff turnover?

We’ve never reported staff turnover as a percentage before as when you are small a few leavers can make percentages look high.

Also, looking to minimise turnover *may* be wrong - the vast majority of people who leave us leave on great terms to further their career in a way that we can’t - it’s often a celebration.

But we’re at a size now with 330 staff that it feels right that we should analyse it openly. So again, we are thankful to our anonymous reviewer who showed us that Speak Up counts.

Source

Our figures are for a 6 month period, so approximately double them to get annual. They show us as about normal for a Services business in the USA. But it’s the reasons that are really important not the raw number as that can mask things. The Leadership Team takes a deep interest in all leavers and looks at reasons - CEO Glenn gets a personal notification on every resignation within 48 hours.

Methodology

Export of “leavers” from BambooHR taken on 14 June 2016.

Includes all Reward Gateway people who left on or after 1st January 2016 - so just under 6 months of data.

We’ve deliberately not done a 12 month report (which would be more normal) because we had a lot of change in the second half of 2015 as share plan two cashed out and we had a lot of change - it wasn’t reflective of normal.

We had an average of 329 people in the period

This is the raw chart from BambooHR.

BambooHR helps us track everything really easily for all of our people worldwide so we can get this data really quickly.

314 staff at the start, 344 at the end, average of 329 which we need to know to calculate staff turnover

Overall staff turnover for the period is 9.4%

To be reflective of normal business we needed to reflect a couple of exceptional situations.

A member of the New York team actually left in 2015 but for technical reasons was recorded in Bamboo in 2016.

4 members of staff left marketing in Macedonia as we moved the roles to Boston.

1 person who left engineering in the period came back

People who left between 1st Jan and 13 June 2016 31

Average headcount during the period 329

Staff Turnover(leavers divided by average number of staff) 9.4%

Excluding probationary periods, Staff turnover is 6.6%

9 out of 37 (25%) of our leavers were within their first 6 months of service so were clased as “probationary period leavers”

Chris Gannon, Director of Talent is in charge of further improving our recruitment process to try even harder to fit people, culture and role.

We’d like to get this number as low as possible as it has a real cost to the business and a human cost too.

People who left between 1st Jan and 13 June 2016 (excluding people on probation, in their first 6 months)

22

Average during the period 329

Non probationary churn (average during the period divided by people who left) 6.6%

Next look at where staff leavers are - are they concentrated in one place or team?

How does it look by team?

The Glassdoor question asked if

7 people left engineering- it’s a big team of 70. 3 of those were because we moved the mobile app development team to Macedonia.

4 left Sales - 3 in UK and 1 in Aus.

4 people left employee experience - large team of 48 people.

3 left Product from a team of 13.

3 of the 7 caused because we moved mobile app development to our new Skopje office in Macedonia

Average Length of service of leavers

Average tenure in days of leavers in the period was 949, which is 2.6 years.

In 2014, Payscale reported the median length of service, before moving, for a Gen Y employee as 2 years. 2.6 years

Source Data

To be transparent, the source data is public for all RG staff to access.

You can look at the spreadsheet and cut the data in different ways. We took names off to keep private things private.