What About Employee Attrition?

The opening lines of this article from Korn Ferry brings up an issue that distinguishes corporate from school employment environments. 

“Imagine a corporate leader arriving in an auditorium for an annual town-hall meeting with a couple hundred staffers. The first thing she notices is how many faces look familiar—in fact, too many faces. Scanning the room, she realizes she can’t find a single new hire in the crowd. Not one. It dawns on her: Hardly anyone has left the firm in the last year.

Multiply this by the thousands, and eventually millions, and you begin to realize that the corporate world has quite a problem on its hands. Forget adopting AI, in fact—this may be a bigger issue in 2026. Last fall, the term ‘job hugging’ swept through the media, as workers young and old decided it was better to stay put than leave. Today, they are still staying put.”

Implicit in the idea that near-zero employee attrition is problematic is the belief that some turnover is actually healthy. Perhaps some level of attrition creates opportunities for other employees or removes otherwise unhappy workers from the organization. However, this is very different from the view I hear in many independent and international school boardrooms. To more than a few board members, almost any employee attrition signals a problem with senior management. Looking past the departure of beloved teachers—which inevitably prompts questions from the board about what is driving them away—even the exit of a seriously underperforming administrator is often seen by some board members as a failure of hiring from the start. Is it the case that employee attrition is, for the most part, net positive in one sector and net negative in the other?

In their own defense, heads often try explaining why ventilation through a non-zero attrition level can be advantageous for schools. But, someone on the board will say, “Maybe it is true that we would be better off without some teachers, but not this one” (remember that every teacher or coach, even the least effective one in the school, is someone’s favorite).

Are the principles surrounding attrition really different across sectors? Or does the close familiarity that many parent board members have with faculty make them more sensitive to departures? I believe it’s the latter, which is actually a type of conflict of interest, but I would love to hear others’ thoughts.