Last year companies saw an increase in turnover rate for high-performers, driven by a search for growth and a lack of internal mobility. In a difficult job market, top-performing employees have the greatest ability to secure a new role – and pose the greatest threat to your business performance when they leave.
Proactive human capital management (HCM) insights and a talent management strategy are required to minimize the risk of losing your best employees.
Turnover Rate for High-Performing Employees
The median high performer attrition rate across industries increased +14% year over year (YoY), according to the Workday Global Workforce Report, with the retail industry experiencing a +64% increase in attrition YoY and healthcare seeing +28% YoY.
Top-performing employees – those who drive the most value for your business – have been leaving at a rising rate.
Common Reasons High-Performers Leave Jobs
Top-performing employees leave for new growth opportunities. Staff often feel stuck in their current role with no advancement opportunities, feel undervalued or underpaid, and aren’t being challenged in a way that promotes engagement and development.
Internal promotions fell in 10 of 11 industries, with internal hiring down 8% YoY in the first half of 2025, based on Workday’s report. Fewer internal opportunities pushed top employees to look elsewhere.
A lack of internal mobility is a missed opportunity for your business to define the skills needed to reach your goals and train internally to retain top talent and drive value.
Top Business Risks of Losing High-Performers
Losing top talent creates tangible negative impacts, including reduced efficiency, decreased revenue, lost organizational knowledge and competitive risk.
Sales and other KPIs take a hit when a key employee leaves, such as reducing efficiency on critical processes or decreasing sales close rates, ultimately impacting revenue.
Backfilling roles takes time and money to source, interview and train. With more than half of roles posted taking more than 30 days to fill, and 25% taking over 60 days, you may also have to hire temporary staff in the interim or risk burning out your team with additional job responsibilities.
A loss of organizational knowledge can be an underestimated risk. Efficiency and quality can suffer, creating mistakes or even compliance issues while existing or new staff try to fill the gaps. And a savvy competitor won’t hesitate to capitalize on that knowledge by hiring your former star employee.
How to Prevent Top-Performing Employee Turnover
To reduce your risk of losing top talent, and the negative business impacts associated with that, you need to review your company data to understand attrition risks and development opportunities and create a proactive talent management strategy.
Tips for Developing a Talent Management Strategy
Maximize Visibility into HCM Data
If your business is using separate systems for HR and payroll functions, stitching together data from different systems is slowing down or limiting your ability to monitor employee performance, engagement, development and turnover trends. This puts leadership in a reactive position.
A unified ERP platform like Workday simplifies data access across HR and payroll, so you can identify more holistic, actionable talent management insights. Workday GO activation by Three Link Solutions can help small and mid-sized businesses quickly transition to an HCM system that evolves with your business.
Assess Talent Risks and Opportunities
Make your employee data more consumable with dashboards that visualize metrics and surface key trends. The Workforce Readiness dashboard by Three Link is a pre-built, Workday-native packaged solution that goes live in hours.
The multi-tab solution provides views for workforce tenure, turnover rate, pay for talent and more. You can identify and drill down into trends, such as turnover rate by performance rating or department, to tailor action plans.
Define Career Growth and Mobility
Outline what career growth means for your business, which can include lateral moves, promotions, special projects or upskilling opportunities.
Once career growth is defined, it’s critical to communicate this to employees to avoid assumptions about promotions being based on tenure alone or frustrations over unclear performance expectations.
Leadership should also develop an internal mobility plan using visibility into your workforce’s skills and potential, to mitigate the risk of losing top talent and increase the value they can add.
Cultivate Your Culture
Talent development should become a part of your business culture. Consider how you can:
- Offer challenging work and learning opportunities to engage top performers
- Maintain accountability for ongoing performance reviews and development conversations
- Acknowledge staff who demonstrate company values as well as high performance
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Learn how Three Link is helping growing businesses make the switch to Workday.
See a demo of the Workforce Readiness dashboard for Workday.
Read common myths about Workday for small and mid-sized businesses.
Source: Workday Global Workforce Report
