I recently had my staff analyse some of our staff statistics. It turned out that for 2015 we had a 9% turnover.  Essentially what that would mean, if you want to see all new faces at the firm, is that you probably have to wait approximately 11 years!  Our median employee has been with us over 2 years.  I use a median figure quite often, even with silly things like a spreadsheet I keep of my weight for about 10 years now.  An average sometimes can be misleading, although I can say that my average weight and my median weight are pretty much the same.  I think everyone is familiar with the concept of an average - if there are 5 numbers you add them together, you divide by 5 and you get your average.  An average can be misleading sometimes, because it means that you are affected by a very low figure as well as by a very high figure.  Sometimes a median would give you a different result because what the median is in that 5 number scenario is the value of the number in the middle – number 3.  So it is not the average but the middle figure, or person in this case, in this example who has been at the firm longer than half the staff and shorter than half the other staff.  

That being said, I was stunned to see that at Amazon that median employer is there for a little bit less than a year and then Google for one year.  I would have thought, because we always hear about the share options, but that probably only goes to the top employees who have been there for 10 or 15 years, that it would have been 5, 6 or 7 years.  I cannot imagine for two such major successful firms that their staff turnover would be so high.  I was quite happy with our 9% turnover rate – in other words, during the calendar year 2015, 9% of the staff members who were with us at the beginning of the year were no longer with us at the end of the year.  I think from my recollection my time at the Law Society, where we have similar figures, that that figure was about 10% to 15%, but it would not be unheard of, particularly in the call centre industry or other industries for that to be much closer to 30% if not higher.  In short, we have a relatively low turnover and that is good for a business, not only in terms of what it says about the happiness of your staff but also in terms of the cost of having to retrain people on the procedures as well as the company culture.