Employee Retention

What is Employee Retention?

Employee retention is the company objective of keeping skillful employees and minimizing turnover by fostering a positive work environment to support engagement, showing appreciation to employees, and providing competitive pay and benefits and healthy work-life balance. 

Employers are mainly concerned in retaining employees during periods of low joblessness and heightened competition for talent. To retain employees, organizations use HRM for recruiting, on boarding, engaging and recognizing workers and offer more work flexibility and modern benefits like physical and financial wellness programs.

Employee retention strategies

Companies that are focused on retaining employees typically start with the employee hiring and on boarding route by giving new workers sufficient training and orientation in the culture of the organization. They also provide new employees an opportunity to ask questions and engage in conversation with supervisors about their work. Some companies use systematic recognition and rewards strategies to illustrate they value employees. Employers also focus on competitive pay using employee compensation management software that evaluates pay rates against benchmarks for given regions, job titles and performance ratings. 

Why employee retention is important?

High rates of employee turnover can damage organizations' capability to carry out their mission because of impairments to continuity, failure of institutional knowledge, and high costs of replacing departing workers. Reduced productivity and competitive benefit are among the largest losses caused by employees leaving an organization. Employee exit can also lower confidence and urge more employees to leave the organization. Employee retention is also vital to team building and unity in the place of work, so employees can come to trust and depend on each other.

Another negative effect of turnover is the impact on customers, who can notice that they are dealing with a continual flow of different people. 

References:

Rouse, M. (2018). What is employee retention? -. [online] Available at: https://searchhrsoftware.techtarget.com/definition/employee-retention [Accessed 24 Feb. 2020].