Tuesday, September 25, 2007

The Corporate Leavers Survey

"..each year in this country, more than 2 million professionals and managers in today’s increasingly diverse workforce leave their jobs, pushed out by cumulative small comments, whispered jokes and not-so-funny emails. This rigorous study, the first large scale review of this issue, shows that unfairness costs U.S. employers $64 billion on an annual basis."

Interesting issue. But I've been wondering, and not for the first, how DO they calculate these things?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am the Director of Workplace Programs and Research at the Level Playing Field Institute, the nonprofit which conducted the study you cited above. We calculated the cost by looking only at those people who said they left their job solely because of unfairness. Specifically, we asked, on a scale of 1 to 10, one being not a reason at all and ten being the only reason, to what degree did unfairness affect your decision to leave. We took the percentage of people in the following groups - people of color, heterosexual Caucasian men, heterosexual Caucasian women and gay/lesbian professionals - who responded "ten" and multiplied it by the percentage of people each group who are thought to be "professionals and managers" as according to the Department of Labor. The product of which represented the total number of people in each demographic group who left solely due to unfairness. We then used the Department of Labor's average salary of a professional and manager (which was significantly below $100,000) and multiplied it by 1.5 (the most conservative generally accepted turnover cost in the human resource industry). This product represented the cost of turnover for one employee, which we multiplied by the total number of people who left due to unfairness. Exact numbers and formulas as well as additional information on methodology and our nationally representative sample of over 19,000 individuals can be found at www.lpfi.org