WMBA 6401 Week 3 Turnover Table Breakdown Example

Seventeen Percent Overall, Thirty-Five Percent for Assistants Working Evenings: Taking a Library System's Turnover Table Apart by Job Family, Branch, Tenure and Schedule, and Staffing the Next Quarter

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6401: Human Resource Analytics

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Seventeen Percent Overall, Thirty-Five Percent for Assistants Working Evenings: Taking a Library System's Turnover Table Apart by Job Family, Branch, Tenure and Schedule, and Staffing the Next Quarter

Why the Overall Rate Misleads

Elk River County Library, the composite 14-branch system used in this course, lost 53 of its roughly 310 employees to resignation last year, a voluntary turnover rate of about 17 percent. The board has heard that figure and compared it favorably with public-sector averages it has seen. The overall rate, however, mixes groups that behave very differently. This report takes the table apart, argues which driver the pattern points to and recommends the staffing response for the coming quarter.

By Job Family

Table 1

Voluntary Turnover by Job Family, Last Year

Composite figures from the library's HR information system.

Most of the losses come from two families. Pages are mostly students working a few hours a week, and their turnover follows school calendars; it is high in most library systems and not the focus here. Library assistants are the problem. They staff circulation desks and run children's and computer programs, they take about four months to become fully effective and they are leaving at nearly a quarter a year.

Inside the Assistant Family

Table 2

Library Assistant Turnover by Branch Group, Tenure and Evening Hours

Each pair of rows divides the same 120 assistants a different way; composite figures.

The three breakdowns point in the same direction, but one carries the argument. Late branches lose assistants at twice the rate of standard branches. New assistants leave at four times the rate of those with more than three years. And assistants whose hours fall mostly after 5 p.m. resign about twice as often as colleagues on day-weighted schedules.

The evening-hours split is the most telling, because it cuts across branches. Several assistants at standard branches also work mostly evenings, covering the one late night each standard branch keeps, and they leave at nearly the same rate as assistants at late branches. That suggests the driver is the evening schedule rather than something specific to the four late branches, such as their managers.

What the Other Measures Add

The schedule change rate from Week 2 supports the reading. At late branches, about 22 percent of assistants' shifts were changed with less than a week's notice, against about 9 percent at standard branches. Henly and Lambert (2014) linked shifting, unpredictable schedules to more strain between work and home among hourly staff, and the library's late branches combine evening hours with the most last-minute changes.

The exit interviews point the same way. Of the 28 assistants who resigned, 11 named scheduling as their main reason, more than any other category; 6 left for school or other careers, 5 named pay, 3 moved away and 3 cited a manager. Of the 16 who left late branches, 9 named scheduling.

Pages Are a Different Problem

Pages, the part-time staff who shelve materials, lost 18 of about 80 last year, a rate almost as high as assistants'. Their departures follow school calendars: most leave in May and August, when students graduate or change schedules. That pattern is normal in library systems and differs from the assistant problem in two ways. Pages need far less training, about two weeks, so their turnover costs less. And their departures are predictable, so the response is to recruit each spring and summer rather than to change working conditions. The report therefore treats pages separately and does not include them in the driver analysis.

Checking the Pattern Branch by Branch

To be sure the evening-hours finding was not driven by one unusual branch, the analyst repeated the comparison with each late branch removed in turn. The gap between assistants working mostly evenings and those who did not remained between 14 and 21 percentage points in every case. No single branch explains the result.

The same test applied to tenure gave a similar result: first-year assistants left at higher rates in every branch group, though the gap was widest at the late branches.

The Driver

The pattern points to evening schedules made worse by late changes, concentrated among new assistants who are most often given the evening shifts nobody else wants. Hom et al. (2017) described turnover as the result of attitudes, alternatives and specific events; for these assistants the repeated event is a schedule that changes after they have arranged child care or classes around it.

Staffing Response for the Coming Quarter

Four actions follow. First, post schedules three weeks ahead at all branches, and require a branch manager's approval for any change inside seven days, with the change rate reported monthly. Second, stop assigning new assistants to mostly evening schedules in their first six months; spread evening shifts across tenure bands. Third, create a float pool of four assistants who cover evening gaps across the late branches, so last-minute changes fall on people who chose that role. Fourth, hire five assistants in the coming quarter, ahead of the expected spring losses, rather than after them.

Allen et al. (2010) argued that organizations often misjudge why people leave, frequently over-attributing departures to pay, and that retention efforts work best when targeted at the specific causes found in their own data. Pay was named by only 5 of 28 leavers, and the county scale limits what the library can change there. Scheduling is within its control.

How the Response Will Be Judged

The report will be rerun in three months. If the schedule change rate at late branches falls below 12 percent and first-year assistant resignations fall, the driver was correctly identified. If neither moves, managers at the late branches become the next question.

References

Allen, D. G., Bryant, P. C., & Vardaman, J. M. (2010). Retaining talent: Replacing misconceptions with evidence-based strategies. Academy of Management Perspectives, 24(2), 48-64. https://doi.org/10.5465/amp.24.2.48

Henly, J. R., & Lambert, S. J. (2014). Unpredictable work timing in retail jobs: Implications for employee work-life conflict. ILR Review, 67(3), 986-1016. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793914537458

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530-545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103