Create a Culture That Improves Employee Retention

A higher employee retention rate helps keep top talents in your organization for longer and saves recruiting and training costs.

In this guide, you'll learn seven ways to reduce your turnover rate, including:

• Enhancing your recruitment and onboarding processes

• Providing development opportunities for your employees

• Offering competitive wages, benefits, and team-building activities

What's inside

The guide sets out seven steps to reduce employee turnover. It opens with a Work Institute figure: nearly 38% of employees quit within a year of joining.

• 1. Optimize recruitment: write accurate job ads, keep applications simple, respond quickly and share feedback. Cites Harvard Business Review: 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions.
• 2. Provide an engaging onboarding journey: structured workflows, reminders and a pre-onboarding portal so new hires can prepare before day one. Cites Brandon Hall Group: effective onboarding improves new-hire retention by 82% and productivity by more than 70%.
• 3. Offer attractive compensation and benefits: ask employees which benefits they value, and reward loyalty, e.g. with extra paid time off after a set number of years. Per Gallup, pay and benefits was the main reason for leaving for 16% of respondents.
• 4. Ensure a healthy work-life balance: maximum working hours, minimum breaks, break reminders and shift planning that prevents excessive overtime. Gallup: 62% rate better work-life balance and wellbeing as very important when considering a new job.
• 5. Encourage employee development: regular structured feedback and comparing manager reviews with self-assessments. LinkedIn: 94% of employees stay longer at companies that invest in their development.
• 6. Create motivating career paths: make the org structure and vacant positions visible to plan internal moves and succession.
• 7. Keep employees engaged: recurring eNPS surveys, check-ins and engagement questionnaires tracked over time. Gallup links higher engagement to 21% higher profitability.

Key takeaways

• Retention starts with the candidate experience, before the first day.
• The first weeks are decisive; structure and automate onboarding.
• Ask employees which benefits they actually want before designing a benefits plan.
• Visible career paths keep ambitious employees from looking elsewhere.

Download the full guide below for practical examples for each of the seven steps.