Employee Retention

What is employee retention?

Employee retention is a company’s ability to prevent employee turnover, the process where employees leave the organization and are replaced by new hires. When companies improve employee retention, they have greater success with keeping top performers with the organization, contributing to greater productivity, work quality, and morale. High retention levels can be a strong indicator of employee satisfaction and loyalty.

Example: The company’s high employee retention rate was attributed to its positive work-life balance, abundance of skill-building opportunities, and competitive pay.

Employee retention programs are organized efforts to keep top performing employees with the company. 

Why do employees leave? 

Typically, employees decide to leave their roles when they are dissatisfied with the opportunities and day-to-day routines offered to them. They may feel that they lack a path for growth and skill-building in their current role. They might also feel that there is an unreasonable workload or long hours that interfere with their work-life balance. 

Low levels of employee engagement may be a warning sign of low employee retention, as engaged employees are less likely to depart their organization.

Effective employee retention strategies

When considering retention strategies, consider ways to boost employee job satisfaction and role clarity. This should start from the very first day your employees join your organization. Invest in your onboarding program, creating clear, role-specific training that properly sets expectations and establishes key procedures. 

Additionally, offer skill-building opportunities to retain employees. In particular, soft skills training opportunities and management training programs can have an enormous impact on employee retention. By offering opportunities to improve soft skills, particularly among managers, the entire workplace can benefit from better collaboration, problem-solving, and adaptability.

Encouraging a healthy work-life balance is also important for any workplace’s employee retention efforts. Build this balance into the company culture itself by ensuring workloads are reasonable, offering great employee benefits, and investing in company culture.