How to Read Turnover by Age Group and Spot Strain on Mid-Career Staff

What to check when fewer young employees quit but more mid-career people do

Company-wide turnover can look flat while the picture underneath looks very different once you split it by age.

Turnover among young employees is falling. Meanwhile, turnover among mid-career staff has been climbing for several years in a row.

When you see numbers like that, this guess makes sense:

We got better at keeping young people, but the burden may have shifted onto the mid-career group.

Still, you shouldn't draw that conclusion from turnover by age alone.

There are at least five ways to read these numbers.

Hypothesis 1

The load of protecting young staff moved to mid-career staff

Programs to keep young employees have running costs:

• Training
• One-on-one meetings
• Follow-up
• Answering questions
• Breaking work into smaller pieces
• Cleaning up mistakes
• Making accommodations
• Career support

If the company only builds the program and hands the actual work to mid-career staff, those people end up as support staff while still carrying their own jobs.

Then it may not be true that

fewer young people quitting = the whole workplace getting better.

It may be that

mid-career staff absorbed the young people's burden, so only the young people became likely to stay.

Mid-career staff are asked for results from above and for support from below.

Pressed from both sides, they easily become the squeezed middle layer of the organization.

Hypothesis 2

They can leave because their market value is high

Mid-career staff aren't necessarily the age group with the biggest problems at work.

They may simply be the age group that

has complaints and also has the ability to leave.

Young employees lack experience, so their options for a new job are limited. As people get older, moving gets more costly because of housing, family, job title and pay level.

In between, all of these conditions line up:

• They have real work experience
• There are still plenty of openings
• They can see the ceiling on promotion and pay at their current job
• They can change direction before becoming a manager
• They want better terms for the sake of their family

So a rise in mid-career turnover can happen not because

mid-career staff are the weakest,

but because

mid-career staff are the ones most able to walk out the door.

Hypothesis 3

The same hiring class is simply moving through the age brackets

An age effect and a cohort effect (the pattern of one hiring class) are different things.

The group that sat in one age bracket five years ago now sits in the next one up.

A group shaped by a particular hiring year, a restructuring, a certain boss, a placement or a rule change might just be moving up through the age brackets together.

In that case, it isn't that

people quit once they reach that age,

but that

one particular hiring class keeps leaving.

Age alone isn't what you should look at. You need to layer in:

• Year of hire
• Years of service
• New graduate or mid-career hire
• Placement history
• Boss
• Office or site

Hypothesis 4

The rate is moving because the denominator changed

Turnover rate is generally calculated by dividing the number of people who left by a base such as the number of people on staff.

In an age group with a small base, one person leaving can move the rate a lot.

And if you hire more young people, the rate can drop even when the number of young people leaving stays the same.

For example, turnover by age group can shift from changes like these alone:

• The number of young employees on staff went up
• Few mid-career people were hired
• A large earlier hiring class moved up into the next age bracket
• A reorganization changed how many people are counted

What you must check is:

• Turnover rate
• Number of people who left
• Number of people on staff
• Number of people hired
• Organizational changes during the fiscal year

The rate alone isn't enough.

Hypothesis 5

It's concentrated in particular departments or managers

What looks like a trend by age can actually be caused by a department.

If mid-career employees are concentrated in one department, that department's problems will show up in turnover by age.

So the most important cross-tabulations are:

• Age group × department
• Age group × boss
• Age group × job title
• Age group × years of service
• Age group × overtime hours
• Age group × leave-of-absence history
• Age group × new graduate or mid-career hire
• Age group × reason for leaving

In particular, if departures cluster under the same manager or in the same role, it isn't an age problem.

It's a problem of placement and management.

Counting leaves of absence changes the picture

If you look only at resignations, everyone who stays gets counted as "retained."

But if you also include

• Leaves of absence
• Long-term absences
• Requests for a transfer
• Narrowed job duties
• Requests for demotion
• "Quiet quitting" (doing the bare minimum)
• Mental withdrawal

the real situation may be different.

Even if the resignation rate is flat, you can't say the problem is solved if more people are on leave or mentally checked out.

Quitting is the last exit.

Before that, there are many other ways people pull away.

Indicators to test the "strain on mid-career staff" idea

To test the strain hypothesis, look at the following.

Workload

• Number of projects handled
• Overtime
• Time spent in meetings
• Urgent requests
• Number of roles held at once

Support burden

• Number of people they train
• Answering questions
• One-on-one meetings
• Cleaning up mistakes
• Following up with new hires

Unclear roles

• Work that isn't really theirs
• Projects with no clear person responsible in the end
• Waiting on a boss's decision
• Changes made after the fact
• Covering for others

Pay and authority

• Raises
• Job title
• Discretion
• Headcount
• Reduced workload

If the support burden on mid-career staff alone has grown since the retention program for young staff began, while their authority, staffing and evaluation haven't grown, the strain hypothesis gets stronger.

You also need evidence that could prove it wrong

Don't look only at the numbers that suit a criticism of the organization.

Check these possibilities too:

• A particular large hiring class has reached the age when people change jobs
• The economy or local job openings
• Retirement-age rules or early-retirement programs
• A change in the base number because of reorganization
• Poaching by competitors
• Moving house while starting a family
• A career change before being promoted to manager

Frame your hypothesis so it can be proven wrong.

Instead of deciding that "mid-career staff are being sacrificed" and then gathering numbers,

first decide which data would show it if the burden really were concentrated on mid-career staff.

Conclusion

If overall turnover is flat but fewer young people are leaving and more mid-career people are, the problem hasn't gone away.

It may simply have moved to a different place.

But you can't say so for certain from rates by age group alone.

Only when you layer rate, headcount, denominator, hiring class, department, boss and role together does the structure become visible.

Is keeping young employees being paid for by burning out mid-career staff?

That's a hypothesis worth checking.