What Is Employee Retention?

What is employee retention?

Employee retention is the process of keeping employees on board by ensuring that they are engaged and satisfied with their work, with the organization, with the relationships they have with colleagues and managers, and with the organizational culture.

Why is employee retention important?

Although employers today are addressing the Great Resignation, making employee retention top-of-mind for virtually all organizations, the truth is that employee retention is always important.

The process of recruiting, attracting, hiring, and onboarding employees is expensive. Once an employee is on board, employers are obviously concerned about retaining the talent they have invested in and avoiding the loss of that talent through turnover—voluntary or involuntary. 

Gartner has indicated that total annual employee turnover in the U.S. is likely to increase by 20% when compared to pre-pandemic levels. That represents both significant cost and significant risk for organizations.

What impacts employee retention?

There are a wide range of factors that impact employee retention. These factors change and shift over time, and vary by generation and other employee attributes. Since the pandemic, research has indicated that employees are increasingly valuing flexibility in work scheduling and where they work and that they are taking steps to avoid increasing stress. One of those steps is leaving their jobs, or the work world entirely.

Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report indicates that: “About 60% of employees felt emotionally detached from their jobs last year while almost a fifth described their time at work as miserable.”

Understanding the factors that may be negatively impacting your workforce is critical to improving employee retention.

Using people analytics to boost employee retention

Companies have found that by capturing and analyzing people data they can gain important insights to help them boost employee retention by identifying why people leave and taking steps to improve engagement and satisfaction. 

There’s significant value in doing this. In fact, according to the Work Institute, more than 75% of employees who quit could have been retained. Companies can make an impact on their employee retention when they take specific actions to boost the odds that employees will stay on board. Visier’s people analytics solutions have provided companies with an average 5-year ROI of 293% with users indicating that they’ve achieved a generated returns on their investments in 7.5 months.

It pays to pay attention to the drivers of employee retention.

Read more on employee retention:

• How Does Turnover Impact Your Organization’s Bottom Line?

• How to Reduce Employee Turnover With Workforce Analytics

• The Future of Management Depends on Access to People Data