What Retention Is Worth
Consistent records can reveal where a shift, handover or ramp is failing. The value of details are available here therefore depends on transparent use, clear ownership and comparison at team or process level instead of unexplained surveillance.
A useful independent reference for this topic is CIPD. Treat this article as general operational material and confirm any legal or safety decision with current official guidance.
Assembling the total cost of losing a starter, from budgets that do not talk to each other, on one page.
Everybody agrees warehouse attrition is expensive and almost nobody has the figure. The reason is that the cost is distributed across functions with separate reporting lines.
The lines to collect
Advertising and job board spend, per hire.
Agency introduction or conversion fees.
Recruitment staff time: screening, interviewing, offer administration.
Induction delivery, including the trainer's hours and the room.
Equipment issue: boots, hi-vis, locker, pass, and what is not returned.
The ramp shortfall: the difference between what a person is paid and what they produce, from day one to standard.
Errors during the ramp, and their downstream cost.
Overtime and agency cover for the vacant shifts.
Supervisor time, repeatedly, which is the largest and least visible line.
And the administrative cost of leaving: payroll, final pay, exit processing.
Getting each number
Most are already in a system. Advertising and agency fees are invoices. Induction hours are a schedule. Boots have a purchase price.
The ramp shortfall needs the curve from the ramp note: weeks to standard, and average output by week as a proportion of standard. Multiply the shortfall by the rate.
Supervisor time is the one to estimate honestly: ask three supervisors how many hours a new starter costs them across the first month. The answers cluster, and the total surprises people.
None of this requires precision. A figure that is roughly right and consistently applied changes decisions; a precise one that takes six months to produce changes nothing.
The multiplication
Total per lost starter, times the number of people who left within ninety days last year.
Which is the number to put on one page, with each line attributed to the budget that carries it.
Because the point of the exercise is not the total but the attribution: it shows that recruitment's saving is operations' overtime, and that the skipped induction is quality's error rate.
What the figure usually shows
That losing a starter costs several weeks of their wages, and considerably more where the ramp is long or the role needs equipment tickets.
That the largest lines are ramp shortfall and supervisor time, neither of which appears in any recruitment report.
And that the annual total for a site with high first-fortnight attrition is large enough to fund every intervention in this collection several times over.
Using it
Present it once, to the people who control the budgets it touches.
With one specific proposal attached — the honest advert, the day-three conversation, the buddy target adjustment — and its cost against the figure.
A total with no proposal produces agreement and no action.
The comparison that lands
The cost of one lost starter against the cost of the intervention that would have kept them.
A pair of boots in the right size on day one, a five-minute conversation on day three, a phone call on the Monday they did not appear.
Each costs a fraction of one departure, and the arithmetic is the argument.
Updating it
Annually, or when the rate or the ramp changes materially.
And re-attributing it when the organisation changes, because the whole value of the document is in whose budget each line sits in.
What not to claim
Do not present it as a saving that will be realised.
The realistic claim is that a proportion of these departures is preventable and that the interventions are cheap relative to the cost.
An operation that promises to recover the full figure and does not will have the whole exercise dismissed, and the next person to raise it will start from a worse position.
The measure
The figure itself, produced and dated.
Cost per person present at ninety days, which is the working version of it.
And whether any budget holder changed a decision because of it, which is the only test of whether the page did its job.
Producing it in an afternoon
Pull the invoices: advertising, agency fees, boots and kit.
Pull the induction schedule and multiply the hours by a loaded rate.
Ask three supervisors for an honest estimate of hours per new starter.
Take the ramp curve and calculate the shortfall.
Add them, multiply by last year's ninety-day leavers, and put the budget owner against each line.
Four hours, and the resulting page is the most persuasive document in this subject.
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