You’re Tracking Turnover. But Are You Tracking What Causes It?

If you’re leading an IDD organization right now, you probably know your turnover rate.

You might know it by department.
You might know it by supervisor.
You might even know it by month.

But here’s the uncomfortable question:

Are you tracking the thing that predicts turnover before it happens?

In Episodes 72 and 73 of the IDD Leader podcast, I sat down with Paige Raetz from Proof Positive to talk about staff wellbeing, burnout, and what actually drives retention in human services. What emerged wasn’t just an inspiring conversation about positivity. It was a practical blueprint for thinking differently about workforce stability.

Here are three key ideas that every executive director, program director, and supervisor should wrestle with.

1. Turnover Is a Lagging Indicator

When someone resigns, it feels sudden. It disrupts schedules, stresses teams, and sends everyone scrambling.

But resignations don’t start on the day someone gives notice. They start weeks or months earlier, when disengagement quietly increases and wellbeing quietly decreases. (Well, sometimes they start just days earlier, if we’re talking about early turnover.)

Paige framed it this way: wellbeing is a leading indicator, while turnover and burnout are lagging indicators. In other words, by the time you’re measuring exits, you’re measuring the final chapter of a story that’s already been unfolding.

Many organizations are incredibly disciplined about tracking incidents, compliance metrics, and productivity targets. Those are important. But very few are consistently measuring the conditions that make people want to stay.

What would change if you tracked:

• Sense of connection on teams

• Frequency of small accomplishments

• Opportunities to use personal strengths

• Daily positive interactions

Not as a fluffy morale initiative, but as operational data.

In one example Paige shared, an organization began measuring elements of wellbeing monthly using a simple framework. Over time, they saw increases in engagement scores and decreases in disengagement. They weren’t guessing. They were watching the trend line move.

If you want predictable retention, you need predictable inputs.

2. Pizza Parties Don’t Prevent Burnout

Most of us have tried the “big event” strategy.

Appreciation week.
Food trucks.
Gift cards.
One-time morale boosts.

None of those are bad. Actually, they are good. But as Paige pointed out, they are often one-and-done efforts that don’t touch the daily experience of the job. And if we’re not careful, they can even feel disconnected from reality when the workload remains overwhelming.

The leaders who see meaningful shifts in culture are not necessarily doing more. They are doing smaller things more consistently.

One agency began incorporating “strength spotting” into team meetings. Staff identified a strength they saw in a colleague and named it specifically. They also identified strengths in other departments, which helped soften interdepartmental tension. Over time, communication improved and friction decreased.

Another organization built in a simple “What went well?” reflection into routine debriefs. Instead of only reviewing problems, they intentionally named small wins. Research shows that regularly noticing small accomplishments increases job satisfaction and performance.

None of this required additional funding. It required consistency.

The takeaway is simple but challenging: sustainable wellbeing comes from habits, not events.

3. Positive Emotion Is a Performance Tool

In high-stress environments like ours, the brain is wired to scan for risk. That negativity bias keeps people safe, but it also narrows thinking. When teams operate in a constant problem-focused state, creativity drops and collaboration becomes harder.

Paige highlighted research showing that positive emotions actually broaden cognitive capacity. When people feel even a modest lift in mood, their visual field expands and their problem-solving improves. They literally see more options.

That matters when:

• A supervisor is walking into a tense performance conversation

• A team is navigating a crisis

• An interdisciplinary meeting is stuck in conflict

Small interventions before stressful moments can shift outcomes. Something as simple as beginning a meeting by identifying what has gone right can reset the tone of the entire discussion.

For leaders, this reframes wellbeing from a “nice to have” into a strategic lever. You are not trying to make people artificially cheerful. You are creating the conditions for better thinking, better relationships, and better decisions.

Thriving, Not Just Surviving

Toward the end of our conversation, Paige shared her hope for the future of human services: that people could thrive in this field, not just survive it. That they could build 25-year careers they are proud of instead of constantly asking themselves how to get through one more day.

That vision is not naive. It is deeply practical.

If we want a stable workforce, we must build systems that support wellbeing as deliberately as we support compliance and quality assurance. The organizations that learn to measure and strengthen these leading indicators will not eliminate stress from the work, but they will reduce preventable burnout.

If you’d like to go deeper into the stories, research, and practical examples behind these ideas, you can listen to both episodes here:

Episode 72: How Wellbeing Reduces Turnover
Episode 73: How to Measure Staff Wellbeing (Before They Quit)

Together, they offer a compelling case that retention is not random and burnout is not inevitable. With the right practices in place, workforce stability becomes something you can influence long before someone starts interviewing somewhere else.

And that might be one of the most hopeful leadership insights available to us right now.