5 Employee Retention Metrics to Fuel Strategic Workforce Planning

In today’s dynamic talent landscape, strategic workforce planning hinges on understanding why employees stay—or decide to leave. Organizations face mounting costs and disruptions from turnover, depending on the role, employee turnover costs roughly 50% of their annual salary for entry-level roles, rising to 200% at the senior level.

Yet, many organizations only track surface-level retention data. You’ll likely recognize this formula:

This metric gives you an overall understanding of employee retention, especially if you keep track of it on a rolling basis. But in isolation, it’s not enough to help you make strategic choices for workforce planning. To make an accurate and effective workforce plan, you need a clear picture of your current workforce–what makes your employees stay and what makes them leave.

In this guide, you’ll discover the five key retention metrics shaping today’s forward-thinking workforce planning strategies, unlocking a more agile, data-driven approach to building resilient, high-performing teams worldwide.

Key retention metrics to track in your organization

1. Voluntary and involuntary attrition rate

Use voluntary and involuntary attrition rates to dive deeper into your employee retention by distinguishing between those who leave of their own volition and those who are let go.

High voluntary attrition suggests that employees leave your organization even when you didn’t want them to, because their experience at work doesn’t match what was promised or needed.

Key reasons can include::

• Better growth opportunities
• Higher salaries
• Better work-life balance
• More supportive leadership
• Stronger company culture

High involuntary attrition means you are letting go of people more often than expected. It can be caused by actors such as poor workforce planning, constant corporate downsizing or restructuring, poor hiring matches, unclear expectations, and insufficient support.

To make this data even more useful, calculate the attrition rates by various segments to understand where the problems lie:

1. By tenure: High attrition among new hires and high attrition among long-term staff are likely caused by different issues, and it’s important to know the difference.
2. By department: Team-specific analysis allows you to hone in on specific issues, like poor leadership or a lack of certain resources.
3. By geography: High attrition in a particular region may reveal that your compensation and benefits are not aligned with the averages of the market.
4. By performance: Understand whether you need to better support your low performers, or how well you’re able to retain your high performers.

By segmenting your retention data, you gain a clearer understanding of what's really going on with your employees, empowering you to target and prioritize your retention strategies.

2. Retention rate by tenure

The tenure of your employees will vary depending on your industry, region, or team demographics. For example, Gen Z tends to job-hop in favor of growth, with longer tenures being more common among Baby Boomers.

Solutions geared toward reducing early voluntary turnover (people quitting within their first year) are unlikely to reduce long-term involuntary turnover (people being let go after five years or more). These calculations will help you build more effective retention strategies and forecast attrition in your workforce planning.

3. High-performer turnover rate

Losing high performers comes with various associated costs, namely recruitment and rehiring. However, when high performers leave, they also take valuable experience with them, often leaving behind an institutional knowledge gap. This often impacts the rest of their team as others pick up the slack while you hire a replacement, leading to a dip in productivity and a potential dip in morale. Depending on the role, you may also be losing access to their network or strong client relationships.

This gives you a percentage you can track on a rolling basis to see how it evolves. As your organization evolves, you’ll be able to see how any shifts impact your retention rates.

If you want to prioritize improving your retention rate among top performers, pay close attention to the feedback they give you in reviews and 1:1 meetings.

4. Regrettable attrition

Regrettable attrition refers to any personnel losses that have a significant impact on your business. Some key categories of individuals to consider are:

• People leaders and influencers: Those who are key to the productivity and performance of others, or who help build company culture.
• Relationship builders: Those who have great relationships with your clients and vendors, or who are well-known in your industry, with a network you benefit from tapping into.
• Niche or key skill holders: Those with skills critical for the day-to-day running of your business, whose exact skillset may be hard to rehire.
• Strategic thinkers: Those who have a track record of making game-changing decisions and coming up with creative solutions to problems.

For example, losing a developer who built many of your internal tools means losing business-critical knowledge about your operations and tech stack. Losing your most creative digital marketer means losing momentum in campaign ideation. High attrition among influential and well-liked colleagues can come with a dip in both productivity and morale for your remaining teams.

If you see a rise in regrettable attrition, review the qualitative feedback given in exit interviews. Identify common exit reasons to pinpoint and prioritize areas of improvement.

This date also reveals flaws in your workforce planning. For instance, if product design is critical to your business yet only one senior designer is on staff, their departure would disrupt workflows and place extra pressure on remaining teams while you hire a replacement.

5. Exit reasons and trends

Understanding global exit trends fuels strategic workforce planning by highlighting potential problem areas. For example, in the US, the quit rate has dropped since 2022, which may suggest that employees are happier in their jobs. Yet, a study by Glassdoor shows that employee satisfaction in 2025 is on the decline, hitting professionals in IT, pharmaceuticals, media, and telecommunications the hardest.

Almost 65% of respondents across a range of industries report feeling “stuck” in their careers, thanks to a sluggish job market and a lack of growth within their organizations. Some employees aren’t staying because they’re happy, but because they feel there’s nowhere else to go, leading to a dip in productivity and a rise in absenteeism. Others engage in revenge or rage quitting, completely blindsiding employers and causing disruption.

Knowing this should encourage you to dig deeper into your satisfaction data. Quantify feedback from your review cycles and exit interviews. Even if you have a good employee retention rate, it’s important to know how people normally feel at work so you can easily identify sudden shifts in mood.

For example, imagine you’ve recently moved from a hybrid work model to requiring employees to return to the office daily. It’s far better to learn through your feedback system that this is hurting work-life balance, giving you time to address the issue, than from exit interviews, when it’s too late.

How to leverage retention metrics in workforce planning

Now that you’re armed with actionable insights and easy-to-understand data, you can use them to make strategic decisions in your workforce planning. Here’s how:

Forecast future attrition risk by segment

By tracking average attrition and keeping a pulse on sentiment within segments, you can plan targeted retention strategies or prepare for recruitment. Segmentation allows you to make more strategic choices by tenure, department, geography, and performance. This also helps you to identify skills gaps early if, for example, you see high attrition among early-stage employees (within their first six months), then you can prioritize improvements to your onboarding process.

Backfill with internal mobility vs. external hiring

Hiring from within keeps employees engaged by offering new challenges and growth opportunities. It reduces recruitment and hiring costs, saves time on onboarding, and existing employees tend to outperform external hires thanks to their understanding of the company.

However, external hiring gives you the opportunity to fill skill gaps and add fresh perspectives. It’s also an effective way to bring more diversity into your organization. In an evolving company, external hires can help you be forward-thinking, since they’re not tied to ‘the way we used to do things.’

Use your retention data to understand which of these options best fits your upcoming vacancies. For example, if your goal is to reduce regrettable attrition and you know that exits are driven by a lack of career development opportunities, prioritize internal mobility where possible. This includes both lateral growth via cross-training and upward mobility via promotions.

Plan succession and leadership pipelines

Unfilled leadership positions have a significant impact on productivity and culture. Leaderless teams lack guidance, mentorship, and can suffer burnout as they pick up the slack, potentially causing further attrition.

Good workforce planning involves proactive succession planning, identifying who in your organization could step up before a vacancy occurs. To plan ahead, use your average retention by tenure as a guide. For example, if your average tenure is three years, then start succession planning for each leader once they reach two years.

Understanding exit reasons and trends helps you to understand whether you should prioritize internal mobility or external hiring for leadership positions. If a lack of career opportunities is a problem area, promoting from within shows your teams that you’re serious about their growth. If that’s not an issue and instead the team feels frustration and burnout over a lack of people-hours, consider adding to your headcount externally.

Top best practices for leveraging retention metrics in workforce planning

Not all workforce planning strategies are alike. Make yours more efficient by:

• Combining retention metrics with engagement and performance signals: Use feedback from performance reviews and surveys to understand sentiment before you have to read about it in exit interviews.
• Using data to personalize retention strategies by segment: Never take your overall retention rate at face value. Dive deeper into your segments to get the full picture.k
• Collaborating with managers on retention risk planning: Create a safe space for managers to preemptively flag flight-risk employees, without fear of retaliation.
• Practicing empathy: When employees leave, it’s easy to take it personally or get defensive. Good retention strategies are rooted in empathy, focused on genuinely understanding people’s needs.

Plan and manage a global workforce with Deel

Employee retention metrics can be strategic data points that power more effective and data-driven workforce planning. As a result, it’s critical to have access to trustworthy and centralized people data as a starting point.

Your organization likely already tracks employee engagement, but truly strategic workforce planning demands more. These red flags signal a need for a more efficient solution:

• Disjointed planning tools: It’s hard to align when HR, finance, and leadership are all working from different spreadsheets.
• Budget visibility gaps: Manually forecasting often leads to oversight, which can raise attrition if pay falls below market rates.
• Skill and workforce gaps: Hiring stalls when you’re not clear on which skills you already possess, which ones you can develop internally, and which ones you need to source.
• Basic metrics: Any system that only shows an overall retention figure, without giving you easy access to qualitative feedback or segmented data, cannot support strategic decisions.

Deel HR is your one-stop shop for people management, data, and workforce planning:

1. Use the Deel platform’s built-in Global HRIS to gain a complete picture of your workforce with custom reporting and insights
2. Use the workforce planning tool to plan for headcount, model various workforce scenarios, collaborate with multiple stakeholders on new job requisitions, and track open and filled roles in real time, keeping your org chart tidy and your teams focused
3. Integrate with your ATS of choice: Once you’ve identified the need for new hires, link your approved job requisitions to ATS job postings
4. Leverage Deel Engage, our AI-powered talent management system, to set goals, evaluate performance, identify top performers and individuals with high potential, and plan for their growth in your organization.

Book a demo to see how Deel can power your workforce planning.