The statistics are consistent and telling. 75% of employees leave because of a poor relationship with their manager. So employees don't leave their job, not their organization, but their manager. And what precedes that departure is almost always the same: a gradual decline in work happiness, followed by more absence, less engagement and eventually the resignation. In this blog I'll explain what you can do about it.
In many organizations, turnover is treated as an HR problem. A vacancy opens up, recruitment gets to work. And a few months later, someone else is in the chair. The department runs again. Until the next time.
What's rarely examined is why that chair became empty. Exit interviews help, but only if the questions are good and the answers honest. And that's rarely the case. A departing employee who has criticism of their manager won't say so out loud if that manager can still serve as a reference.
What we do know: the main causes of voluntary turnover almost always have a human component. Not the work itself, not the salary alone, but the immediate work environment. And that work environment is largely determined by the manager. The way they communicate, make decisions, give feedback or fail to, provide space or exert control. That determines, day to day, what it feels like to work at that organization. And this work experience is directly connected to the experience of work happiness.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average recruitment cost per new employee is around €4,300. But that's just the recruitment. Add onboarding, the productivity dip during training, the loss of institutional knowledge, the impact on the remaining team. The real costs are structurally higher. The average is around one year's salary, but can rise to three or four times the departed employee's annual salary.
What HR professionals and directors too often fail to realize: if turnover isn't randomly distributed across the organization, but concentrated around certain managers or departments, that's not a coincidence. It's a signal, a sign that work happiness is under pressure there. This signal calls for a different response than a new recruitment campaign.
The €4,300 in recruitment costs is just the tip of the iceberg. If you factor in productivity loss during onboarding, knowledge drain and the impact on the remaining team, the real costs quickly reach one to one-and-a-half times the annual salary per departed employee. At an organization of 100 employees with a 15% turnover rate, that adds up to hundreds of thousands of euros per year — largely invisible in the accounts, but tangible in the workload and work happiness of the team left behind.
Most organizations have some visibility into their turnover rate. Fewer organizations know exactly where that turnover comes from. And even fewer know why.
It's a blind spot with a logical explanation. Exit interviews are often a formality. The forms are filled out, the data is stored somewhere, but the analysis never happens. Or the analysis is done, but the results are too vague to act on: "better growth opportunities," "different challenges," "personal reasons."
Yet there's a pattern hidden in those vague answers if you look closely. Employees leaving the same department within the same year. Positions that keep needing to be refilled while comparable positions elsewhere in the organization remain stable. This reveals a clear pattern between teams with a high absence rate, a low work happiness score and high turnover.
What the data points show is that turnover is rarely abrupt. An employee who hands in their resignation on a Tuesday made that decision months earlier. What happened after that were small steps toward the exit: showing less initiative, contributing fewer ideas, being less present in meetings, more sick days. Managers who pay close attention see those signals. Managers who only steer on output don't.
Gallup's research into employee engagement repeatedly shows that the direct manager is the strongest predictor of engagement at work — stronger than salary, than the content of the work, than the organization as a whole. This has direct consequences for turnover. An employee who values and trusts their manager tolerates more discomfort than someone lacking that relationship. A poor relationship with the manager accelerates almost every other reason for leaving.
What this means in practice: if you don't break down your turnover data by team or department, you don't actually know what you're measuring. An average turnover rate for the whole organization masks the problems where they really are. This is one of the reasons we at JobAligner developed the Culture Scan.
Employees rarely leave abruptly. What precedes it is a gradual decline in work happiness: less engagement, more absence, less initiative. This is no coincidence — it's a pattern that consistently recurs in turnover research. Low work happiness is therefore not a soft HR theme, but a measurable precursor to hard losses: sick leave costs, turnover costs and productivity loss.
Employees with low work happiness demonstrably call in sick more often. Research by TNO shows that employees who experience little autonomy, feel insufficiently valued or see no prospects for development have significantly more absence days than colleagues who score high on work happiness. In many cases, absence is therefore not a medical problem that coincidentally begins in the workplace. It's a symptom of a work relationship that has been under pressure for some time.
The signals that precede departure are measurable: declining trust in the manager, a diminishing sense of appreciation, a fading outlook on growth. Whoever tracks these signals at team and employee level sees turnover coming on average three to six months before the resignation lands on the desk. That's the window in which your organization can still act.
Poor management isn't a monolithic concept. It's not about the manager who has a bad day once or handles a difficult conversation poorly. It's about behavior patterns that structurally undermine what employees need to stay engaged.
Based on employee research, exit data and Gallup's Q12 framework, there are five behaviors that repeatedly recur as direct precursors to departure:
It's not that every manager displays all five behaviors. One chronic pattern is enough to undermine the trust relationship and put the experience of work happiness under pressure. And once that relationship breaks, you rarely restore it without deliberate intervention.
The usual response to signals about management is training. A day of leadership development, a workshop on giving feedback, an online module on situational leadership. It's not that this never helps. But the results are rarely what organizations hope for.
The reason is fundamental: behavior doesn't change through insight alone. A manager who knows after a training that they should give more compliments — knows that. But back on the work floor, under the pressure of the day, they fall back into old habits. That's not unwillingness. That's how behavior change works, or rather, doesn't work.
Effective leadership development isn't a one-time event but an ongoing process anchored in daily (work) practice. It requires feedback that's concrete and timely, not once a year in a performance review. It requires measurement points that show whether behavior is actually changing. And it requires an environment in which managers can safely learn, even if that means acknowledging what's not going well.
What I keep seeing in conversations with clients: organizations invest considerably in recruitment and onboarding, but structurally little in improving the quality of day-to-day leadership. And more generally, pay little attention to work happiness. While that's exactly the variable that makes the biggest difference in whether employees stay or leave. You can read more about this in a testimonial from one of our clients.
Turnover is reactive measurement. The employee is already gone. The costs are already incurred. The unrest in the team is already there. What organizations need is insight before it gets that far.
That calls for a different kind of measurement than the traditional annual employee satisfaction survey. Not because that survey has no value, but because the frequency is too low and the delay too great. An employee who indicates in January that they're satisfied may have already decided to leave by June. If you only measure that in December, you've missed twelve months of information.
What does work is regular, short-cycle measurement of a limited number of signals. Not a fifty-question survey, but targeted work happiness questions and pulse checks that show where things stand on the dimensions that most strongly predict whether someone is actively looking for something else. Engagement with the work. Trust in the manager. Sense of appreciation. Outlook on development.
If you can view those signals at team and employee level, you see patterns that are invisible at organization level. A team that scores low across the board on work happiness and trust in the manager is a team where turnover is coming. Not maybe. Statistically speaking: probably.
JobAligner's Culture Scan is built on exactly this principle. It gives you insight into the signals that predict turnover and absence — so managers and HR can act in time instead of repairing after the fact.
Based on Gallup research and JobAligner's data, there are four signals that announce turnover earliest and most strongly:
Whoever monitors these four dimensions at employee and team level has an early warning system for both absence and turnover.
Insight is useless without action. And action is ineffective without prioritization. If you break your turnover data down by department, team and employee and see that turnover is concentrated among two or three managers, the question isn't whether you need to do something. The question is 'what' you're going to do.
A few concrete steps that make the difference:
None of these steps is revolutionary. Together, they're rarer than you'd think. Most organizations measure too little, too late, and without the right breakdown. They invest in recruitment while letting the cause of the turnover persist. That's not bad intent. It's the lack of the right (work happiness) information at the right time. Need the right information? Check out our Culture Scan.
Turnover of 8–15% per year is considered normal in most sectors, although this varies greatly by industry: from around 10% in healthcare to 25% in hospitality. What's more relevant than the absolute percentage: turnover concentrated around specific managers or teams is always a warning sign, regardless of the average.
Absence and turnover are, in many cases, two sides of the same coin. Employees with low work happiness call in sick sooner — partly as an escape from a work situation that isn't right. If that absence becomes structural, departure often follows within six to twelve months. Organizations that treat absence purely as a medical problem miss the underlying cause. Read more about this in our blog 'Preventive culture research: stop absence and turnover before it starts'.
Structurally lower turnover starts with addressing the cause, not the symptom. That means: breaking down turnover data by manager, continuously measuring work happiness at team level, coaching managers based on data, and acting before the resignation lands on the desk. Recruitment is not a solution to a management problem.
As long as organizations treat turnover as a recruitment problem, they keep repairing what's already broken. Every new employee who joins a team led by a manager displaying the five behaviors that cause turnover runs the same risk as their predecessor. The chair becomes empty again. The process starts over.
Organizations that structurally reduce turnover do one thing differently: they look at the cause, not the symptoms. They measure at the level where the problem lies. They make managers responsible for the quality of the work relationship with individual employees, not just for their team's output. And they act before the resignation lands on the desk. In effect, they make work happiness a top priority — a KPI directly linked to turnover.
The question isn't whether your organization has managers who cause turnover. Chances are it does. The question is whether you know it, and what you're going to do about it!
Curious what this means for your organization? Request a demo.
