Every businessowner knows the sinking feeling of a good employee handing in their notice: the recruitment fees ahead, the induction process, the knowledge walking out of the door, the workload landing on everyone left behind. Behind every job advert sits a simple truth — the cheapest employee to recruit is the one you already have.
The scale of it
The national numbers are sobering. Analysis by the Chartered Institute of Personnel
Development (CIPD), the professional body for HR, puts the UK’s overall employee turnover at around 34% a year — roughly a third of employees moving to another employer, and a further 7% leaving work altogether (CIPD, 2024). That is one in three employees, every year. The pressure is not easing: surveys up to 2025 found around 23% of UK workers planning to leave their jobs in the short-term (Personnel Today, 2025). And smaller organisations — where each person carries a bigger share of the responsibility for the business — typically experience higher turnover than large ones.
Widely cited research a decade ago by Oxford Economics put the average cost of replacing a single employee earning £25,000 or more at £30,614, once recruitment, temporary cover, training and lost productivity were factored in. More recent estimates
put typical replacement costs at £25,000–£30,000, rising to £40,000–£100,000 for specialist and senior roles (PayFit, 2025). For a ten-person business at the national turnover rate, that is three departures a year — the best part of £100,000 in replacement costs.
The Wellbeing connection
Why do employees leave? Rarely because of the job role itself. Deloitte’s research puts a
national price on wellbeing: of the £51 billion that poor mental health costs UK employers every year, £20 billion is staff turnover due to being unhappy at work (Deloitte, 2024). The same research finds that 63% of workers show at least one sign of burnout, up from 51%. And the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) figures provide a worrying backdrop: a record 964,000 UK workers suffered work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, losing an average of 22.9 working days (HSE, 2025). Attrition, in other words, is not a recruitment problem with a wellbeing footnote; it is a wellbeing problem that arrives
disguised as a resignation letter.
What businesses can do — and how We Work Well helps
If people leave because of poor wellbeing, then improving wellbeing is a retention strategy, arguably the most cost-effective strategy a business can purchase, given Deloitte’s finding of £4.70 return for every £1 invested. We Work Well‘s support begins with a FREE Staff Wellbeing Survey: an anonymous baseline of how your people are doing.
Signing up to We Work Well Membership converts your data into action, with our support every step ofthe way. Membership includes:
• An action plan built on what your people say abouttheir wellbeing
• Accredited Level 2 First Aid for Mental Health training, so struggling colleagues
have someone to turn to
• Support for whoever leads wellbeing in your business,with regular calls through the year and email support
• The Work Well Programme — self-help modules for everymember of the team, and a step-by-step whole-business wellbeing method for leadership, including how to reduce workload
• An evidence trail of your duty of care — increasingly asked for by insurers and the candidates you most want to hire.
One in three employees leaving every year is the sum of many decisions — and every decision is influenced by how employees feel about working in your business. That is the part you control, and it costs far less to improve workplace wellbeing than £30,000 a departure. Start with our free survey. Find out what your people tell you anonymously that they are not telling you face to face.
References
CIPD (2024) Employee turnover and retention. Available at: https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/factsheets/turnover-retention-factsheet/
Deloitte (2024) Poor mental health costs UK employers £51 billion a year. Available at: https://www.deloitte.com/uk/en/about/press-room/poor-mental-health-costs-uk-employers-51-billion-a-year-for-employees.html
Health and Safety Executive (2025) Health and safety statistics: Key figures for Great
Britain 2024/25. Available at: https://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overview.htm
Oxford Economics, The Cost of Brain Drain. Available at: https://www.oxfordeconomics.com/resource/the-cost-of-brain-drain/
Personnel Today (2025) reporting onUK workers’ resignation intentions, cited in PayFit and CircleHR turnover analyses. Available at: https://www.personneltoday.com/