Calculating Employee Turnover Rate

[brianjensvold]

I want to know why this is the standard instead of taking the number of turnovers in each month and dividing it by the number of employees you had say at the beginning of that month, then find the average of those rates. When I hear 342% turnover rate it sounds like we are losing all of our staff, replacing all of them, losing those, and same thing again plus an additional 42%. In short I'm having a hard time of understanding what 342% "means". How is this better than the average per-month turnover-rate?