Bill Pflanz said:
If you start doing some analysis on attrition, it will be important to also gather information on why they left. Through root cause analysis and corrective action, the idea would be to reduce the number of lost employees. I was looking at employee attrition in order to correllate it with client attrition.
It's important to distinguish between the terms "attrition" and "turnover." The former generally relates to loss of employees through means other than involuntary termination, such as retirement, resignation and transfer. The latter connotes
replacement of one employee with another in the same position. We'll often hear of "downsizing," for example, wherein the strategy is to reduce headcount by
attrition--not replacing employees who leave on their own.
Care needs to be taken with the term "correlate" as well. There's a difference between simply
comparing two variables in search of a potential relationship and finding a
correlation, which suggests a
causal relationship between two or more variables. In other words,
A and
B might happen concurrently or in succession, but that doesn't mean that there's a causal relationship between them.