Ever heard the adage: “People don’t leave jobs; they leave bosses”? That’s a vast over-simplification, says Daniel Ash, chief executive officer of Journeyfront, a hiring platform. He asked an audience at the ProMat 2025 supply chain conference in Chicago March 18 to consider a job where they might have liked the manager, but left the job anyway. Clearly, a bad boss can’t always be the main reason for workforce turnover. “That’s only a fraction of the problem,” he said.

The danger, Ash believes, is oversimplifying workforce turnover on the one hand — blaming it on a single factor such as hourly pay or shift flexibility — or else concluding that the issue is so complicated that it can’t be solved. 

The problem can be fixed, and it desperately needs to be fixed, according to Ash and his co-presenter, Zach Peluso, director of talent acquisition at KeHe, a food distributor. According to a comprehensive study by The Department of Labor, replacing a worker costs 30% of that worker’s annual salary, because of screening and hiring a new worker, plus paying other workers over-time to cover the departed worker, and then training a new worker to the point where they are productive. 

And those are just the tangible costs, said Ash. If you add in intangibles — such as the impact on customer service and sales, or the fact that other workers often decide they’ll join a co-worker in leaving, let alone the company’s reputation as an employer (the “employee brand,” as Ash terms it) — those costs can rise to 100-200% of a worker’s annual salary.

Worse, those costs tend to be spread out across multiple departments, so they can be hard to see; that is, before they hit the bottom line. And, in the meantime, faced with high worker turnover, companies can adopt strategies that fail to fix, or can even exacerbate the problem. At the ProMat session, entitled “Reducing Workforce Turnover: Proven Research and Approaches,” Peluso described the way KeHe lowered the bar for hiring during COVID, when there was intense competition for warehouse workers. “Turnover was terrible,” he said. “If you could mist a mirror, you got the job.” As a result, the company fell into a vicious cycle, where increased turnover led to being under-staffed, which in turn led to paying huge amounts of over-time. Adopting a more selective hiring process turned this into a virtuous cycle, and over the course of two years, the company reduced worker turnover by 50% — delivering an estimated saving of $15 million.

How did they do it? In part, by gathering more detailed data about who they were hiring, why they stayed and why they left, via exit surveys and interviews, management and employee group panels, and analytics that compared data gathered during the hiring process with the eventual stay-or-leave outcome. 

There are three main drivers of workforce turnover, according to a 2017 meta study of a wide number of studies on voluntary employee turnover, Ash explained: Market-related, such as there being other job options with the warehouse across town; job-related, such as job security, positive employee feedback, or workload; and person-related, which tends to be more about overall career satisfaction or work-life balance. “Not having a broad awareness of what’s going on, you can miss what you need to do to address this problem,” said Ash. “There’s a lot going on!”  

After deciding to fix its turnover problem, KeHe used the data it gathered to investigate whether their job descriptions were accurate, and whether they got the right information at interview, for example. Then they went after the range of employees who were likely to answer while employed at the company that they were “satisfied” enough to stay, instead of those who ended up reporting they were “very satisfied,” or by contrast those who were “very dissatisfied” and left. 

One particularly innovative change of strategy was to turn away from pursuing only workers with prior “relevant” experience, such as in warehouses or distribution centers. Instead, KeHe accepted and sought out applications from people who had worked in “non-aligned” but equally high-pressure businesses such as fast food or the construction industry. The results were surprising. “It turns out, bricklayers are our best palletizers,” Peluso said.

Of course, pay rates are a factor. But both Peluso and Ash agreed that it’s a mistake to assume that offering a higher hourly wage will automatically reduce worker turnover. And, if you’re going to determine if raising wages makes a difference, it’s best to do it in one location and conduct A/B testing to see if it actually works. 

In every case, there’s an extraordinary amount of insight into why workers stay and leave that can be mined from careful collection and analysis of data. 

“Turnover is expensive, but you can fix it,” said Ash. “It just has to be data-driven.”