by Dan Blade

Created on: September 12, 2010

The changing of personnel in an office can have both a positive and negative effect on the business.  Watching a person, or group of people, depart an organization only to see the company soon staffed with a new crew can demonstrate both advantages and disadvantages to the business.

 Knowledge, education, job familiarity and personality will all play into how the office will change with the loss of the staff and adapt to the newbies coming onboard.

 *Advantages:

 A new employee may bring a new enthusiasm to the tasks that make up a job; this 'new blood' can provide a nice balance of motivation. For instance, that project which has been left on the back-burner can be started up again with some fresh ideas.

 Employee turnover can lead to different points of view which may result in innovative ideas.  As an example, an organization composed of new members will have a mode of thinking which when  introduced may change the office dynamic and lead to pioneering ideas.

 If the last person was not people oriented he/she may have had few point of contacts to go to.  A new person can re-engage and develop a better list of contacts

 *Disadvantages

One of the most significant disadvantages of high employee turnover is the loss of fully trained employees. 

 When your most experienced person departs for retirement or greener pastures, there is a vacuum of intellectual knowledge that goes with them.  All the training that they went through to gain knowledge is now gone with their exit. This can be costly because giving the job to a less experienced person that needs time away from the job to get trained can delay productivity. For instance, lost time on projects as the new person gets spun up can cause setbacks.

 A loss of points of contact is another drawback.  There is a good chance that the experienced employee’s rolodex will not transfer to the new employee and a lot of time will be spent building or re-building those relationships; this could mean a lot of networking time for the new group of employees.

 The changeover of one employee at a time could be a difficult situation, however the turnover of multiple employees can gut an office and make it slow to a near stop until the training and experience levels rise enough to re-engage with the same efficiency and expertise as before.

 There are many advantages and disadvantages of employee turnover, however each business should evaluate to determine what level of turnover is acceptable and strive to remain within that designated range of the comings and goings of employees.

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