According to the 2024 Saratoga Annual HR Benchmarking report from PwC, turnover and promotion rates have declined to pre-pandemic levels and many DEI, workforce structure and talent attraction metrics have begun to stabilize. Meanwhile, certain HR functions, such as people analytics, have seen significant growth across multiple industries.
About Saratoga’s 2024 Annual Benchmarking Report
Each year PwC releases the Saratoga HR and workforce benchmarks that includes 30,000+ industry-specific benchmarks based on over 1,000 metrics derived from hundreds of participating organizations spanning dozens of industries across the United States. These benchmarks allow organizations to compare themselves against their peers and gain a more comprehensive understanding of their organization’s performance.
The 2024 Saratoga Annual Benchmarking Report summarizes key trends and insights derived from the annual Saratoga data. Download a full copy at no cost from the PwC website.
This year’s report covers four key trending workforce topics:
- Turnover
- Talent Attraction
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)
- Workforce Structure
Turnover and Mobility Reductions
Turnover remains a top priority for Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) due to its significant financial impact and the challenges it poses in maintaining a skilled workforce in a competitive labor market.
From 2018 to 2020, the voluntary separation rate remained level at around 11% before jumping to a high of 15.9% in 2021. Since then, it receded to 14.7% in 2022 and then 13.7% in 2023. Coinciding with a 5% drop in first year turnover, the data indicates that employees are increasingly staying put.
More Hiring from Within and Fewer Promotions
As fewer employees chose to leave their jobs, it is not surprising that the external recruitment rate – external hires as a percent of headcount – has also reduced by 17%.
However, the overall promotion rate has also decreased by about 15%, meaning that both upward and outward motion reduced significantly last year.
While all subgroups measured saw decreases in promotions, the promotion rates dropped most significantly for White men, falling nearly 23% in one year.
DEI Stable but Varied
Representation of women and racial/ethnic minorities in management roles was relatively stable in 2023 when measuring across all industries. Significant differences across industries remain; for example, the percentage of management that are women in healthcare organizations is over 2X the percentage in technology companies, while technology companies have about 50% higher racial/ethnic minority representation than their healthcare counterparts.
Rise of HR and People Analytics
The HR teams in the technology and manufacturing/engineering industries saw large gains relative to the organization’s size. These two industries have historically had fewer HR employees than other industries but are now in line with most other industries.
This also coincided with a 200% increase in people analytics teams in manufacturing/engineering companies and 20% or higher increases in many other industries. Given the relatively small sizes of people analytics teams, these large swings can easily be caused by hiring just a few more people into the team, but they do show an overall trend of increasing people analytics teams across the board.
Want to Know More?
These have been just a few samples of the 2024 Saratoga Annual HR Benchmarking Report. To read the complete report, download it from the PwC website. If you want to learn how to get access to the complete Saratoga dataset with 30,000+ industry-specific benchmarks, or get help calculating or interpreting HR metrics, visit the Saratoga website today.