Our blog is back. After taking a brief hiatus and a delayed new year's resolution, we'll bring you more on employee and customers metrics thoughts via the Critical Metrics Blog.

At a recent dinner I was speaking with a business owner about what we do and how we can use employee surveys to reduce turnover. We then starting talking about how to calculate turnover and the differences between voluntary and involuntary turnover as well as regrettable and forgettable turnover.

Its not just about how many people leave (turnover), its about how many people leave on their own (voluntary turnover) who you don't want to leave (regrettable turnover). There is such a thing as functional turnover - you may have made a bad hire and you want someone to leave or ask them to (forgettable turnover).

The link below has some useful definitions of turnover in case you need additional references.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnover_%28employment%29