Highlight
| Staff retention costs are easy to underestimate until a business calculates them properly. CIPD data puts UK employee turnover at 34% a year, and Ireland’s CIPD reports 80% of employers now struggling to retain talent. For multilingual teams, language confidence is a measurable factor in who stays. |
It’s costing you money – the question is how much, and CIPD found in its 2022 Resourcing and Talent Planning survey that 17% of UK employers calculate the cost of labour turnover, and only 12% collect data on retention initiatives. Most businesses are managing a cost they’ve never measured.
For teams with multilingual staff, there’s a specific version of this problem. Our logistics service page makes the case that confused workers leave: misread pick sheets, missed instructions, a supervisor who can’t get a straight answer to a straight question. This article backs that claim up properly, with published UK and Irish figures on what turnover actually costs, and the research on where language confidence fits into the picture.
What UK employee turnover actually costs
The headline number is stark. CIPD’s analysis of ONS Annual Population Survey data puts average UK employee turnover at 34% a year, meaning a typical business loses roughly one in three employees annually, once you include both people moving to a new employer and people leaving work altogether.
That average masks huge sector variation, and the variation matters for how seriously you should take it. CIPD’s own analysis notes that in sectors like hospitality, where skills are more transferable and training costs are lower, high churn does less financial damage per departure than it would in a sector where training someone up takes real time and money. That’s a useful lens for manufacturing, logistics and food production specifically, which are sectors where a new starter genuinely can’t do the job safely on day one, and where the “transferable skills” cushion CIPD describes doesn’t apply in the same way.
On cost specifically, the most rigorous UK study remains Oxford Economics’ “Cost of Brain Drain” research, commissioned by Unum. It’s worth being upfront that this dates to 2014 and focused on professional roles across five sectors, but its retail sector findings are the closest published UK figure to a lower-paid, operational role: replacing an employee earning £25,000 or more carried an average cost of roughly £20,113 in that sector, once lost productivity, training time and recruitment logistics were accounted for. You might want to treat the exact figure as dated, but the structure of the cost still holds, and matches what more recent industry estimates describe.
The cost picture in Ireland
Ireland’s story is less about a precise price tag and more about pressure that’s easy to feel and hard to quantify. CIPD Ireland’s HR Practices in Ireland 2026 report found 80% of employers now finding it difficult to retain talent (p.11), with turnover having increased at a third of organisations over the past year. Asked what’s driving people out the door, employers named better career progression elsewhere (71%) and cost of living (41%) as the two biggest factors.
Where language confidence fits in
The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford has published directly on the relationship between English proficiency and labour market activity, and the underlying academic research is consistent: a widely cited study by Dustmann and Fabbri, published in The Economic Journal, found that language proficiency has a strong, positive effect on employment probabilities for immigrants in the UK, and that a lack of fluency is linked to measurable earnings losses. Language confidence is tied to how securely someone sits in a role and how their career progresses within it, which is exactly the “career progression” driver CIPD Ireland’s employers flagged as their top reason for losing people.
On the employer side, SHRM (the US equivalent of CIPD) has reported that employers offering workplace English classes see measurable retention gains among staff with limited English proficiency, alongside better internal mobility into higher-paying roles.
A worker who can’t confidently follow a shift briefing, raise a concern, or understand what a promotion would actually require of them is a worker with a structurally weaker case for staying, regardless of how much they’d otherwise like the job.
We saw this firsthand with Irish Oxygen, where targeted language training transformed workplace confidence and opened the door for team members to take on broader responsibilities and advance internally.
What this means for a retention strategy
If you’re building or refreshing employee retention strategies this year, three things follow from the data above:
- Measure before you assume. CIPD’s own figures show most employers don’t calculate turnover cost at all, so before investing in any retention initiative, it’s worth establishing what a departure actually costs your specific operation, using your own wage and training-time data rather than a generic industry average.
- Treat language confidence as a retention lever. The research above ties language confidence to career progression and job security, the two things CIPD Ireland’s employers named as their top retention drivers. Workplace English training isn’t a separate initiative from your retention strategy; for a multilingual team, it’s part of it.
- Build it into the onboarding. Language gaps tend to do the most damage in misunderstood inductions, missed safety instructions, unclear expectations. Addressing them early is much cheaper than addressing them as an exit-interview finding.
We work with HR and operations leaders in manufacturing, logistics, pharma, and food production to build workplace English training around exactly this – the language of the workplace and the confidence people need in order to stay, progress, and do their jobs safely.
If you’re building the business case for retention spend this year and want a second set of eyes on where language fits into it, get in touch. We’re happy to talk through what we’re seeing on the ground and share what’s working in practice.
