Low Attrition. Great News?

Low attrition is generally considered a good thing. Right? Not always. One of our recent Training Needs Analysis exercises brought out a rather interesting perspective. The organisation had extremely low attrition. At first glance, this looked like a wonderful indicator of employee loyalty and organisational stability. But when we dug deeper, the story changed. We found: Complacency. People who had been in the system for years had become comfortable doing things the way they had always been done.

Resistance to change. The business had evolved. The industry had evolved. Customers had evolved. But some behaviours hadn’t. Friction between old and new employees. The newer employees came with different expectations, ideas and ways of working. The legacy workforce sometimes viewed this as impatience or lack of understanding. Delayed decision making. Processes and policies took longer to change because the organisation had become comfortable with the existing ways of working.

And perhaps the most interesting finding: While overall attrition was low, attrition among new joiners was significantly higher. That tells a very different story. This is not an argument against experienced employees. Nor is this about “Gen X vs Gen Z”. It is about something much more fundamental: Can an organisation retain its experience without becoming trapped by its past? Longevity is valuable. Institutional knowledge is valuable. Loyalty is valuable.

But when experience becomes the reason for saying: “We have always done it this way.” it can become expensive. This is why we believe diagnosis is so important before designing a learning intervention. A number on an HR dashboard can tell you what is happening. It rarely tells you why. And sometimes… The number that looks like your strength may actually be hiding your biggest challenge.