Employee Development
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A recent Gallup study found that over half of all employees are actively seeking new roles. Even more concerning, employee long-term commitment is the lowest it’s been in nearly a decade.
While voluntary turnover has cooled since the pandemic, many employees are still looking elsewhere. Whether that’s from lingering uncertainty after widespread layoffs, dwindling engagement, burnout, or a combination of all three, the important thing to note is that while turnover is costly, it’s also preventable.
Gallup found that replacing an employee can cost up to 2x their annual salary, they also found that nearly half (42%) of the employees who voluntarily left said that their manager or organization could have done something to keep them from leaving.
In this blog, we’ll explore what employee engagement and retention strategies are, why they matter, what typically causes employees to leave, and 15 proven ways to reduce employee turnover. You’ll also get a step-by-step process to turn these ideas into a real employee retention plan you can start using today.
What are Employee Retention Strategies?
Employee retention strategies are the deliberate actions managers and HR leaders take to keep employees from quitting. Any number of tactics or strategies can be a part of your employee retention program, from increasing compensation to building onboarding processes and strengthening manager-employee relationships.
If you’re looking for strategies for employee retention that work, the biggest theme is improving employee engagement and making it clear that your company is actively working toward enhancing the employee experience. SHRM found that just 9% of employees who were experiencing a positive work culture considered leaving. In addition, they discovered that employees who rated their organization as effective or very effective at addressing workplace needs were more than twice as likely to report job satisfaction and commitment to their organization.
Employee Retention Strategy vs. Retention Program (what's the difference?)
An employee retention strategy is your overall umbrella plan for employee retention. It defines who you’re trying to retain and how you’ll go about it. Retention programs for employees are the specific initiatives inside that umbrella plan. Programs help you put your overall strategy into action. These are things like onboarding, recognition, compensation, and anything else designed to keep employees engaged and committed.
The True Cost of Turnover (beyond replacement costs)
Turnover is expensive and time-consuming for everyone involved: recruiters, because they have to reopen requisitions and start their candidate search from scratch, and managers who have to contend with lost productivity, reassigning work, and onboarding a new hire. In total, Gallup pins the cost of turnover for different roles at:
- 200% of salary for leaders/managers
- 80% for technical roles
- 40% for frontline roles
These are often direct cost estimates, though. Once you factor in indirect costs, those intangible costs like lost productivity and workplace disruption, turnover costs can balloon.
Direct costs are much easier to quantify. They include things like:
- Severance
- Unemployment taxes
- Recruiter/recruiting firm fees
- Onboarding costs
- Work equipment, etc.
Indirect costs are a little trickier to track, but they’re what can lead to turnover costing up to 3x an employee’s salary. Indirect costs include:
- Lost productivity
- Additional stress on remaining employees
- Low morale
- Lost institutional knowledge
- Customer disruption
- Reduced work quality from new employees
Considering these factors, turnover isn’t cheap, but it is preventable with effective employee retention strategies.
What Retention Success Looks Like (metrics to track)
How do you know if your employee strategies are working? By tracking your efforts, the KPIs that quantify turnover and its leading indicators.
Start by tracking the basics: voluntary monthly and annual turnover rate and costs. This will tell how many people are leaving and how much it’s costing you.
From there, you can choose to track leading indicators of turnover, such as burnout and unhealthy workloads. Even keeping a pulse on exit interviews can go a long way toward understanding how well your employee retention strategies are working.
Why Employee Retention Strategies are Important
Using employee retention strategies often involves making work better for your employees. That effort doesn’t go unnoticed. As mentioned earlier, SHRM found that 91% of workers who found their organization effective at addressing workplace needs reported being satisfied with their jobs and more committed to their organizations.
Employees take note when you take their experience seriously. And when employees stay longer, their skills and output grow, and your organization benefits accordingly.
Protecting Performance, Culture, and Customer Experience
When people leave your organization, it affects everyone. Yes, teammates feel that disruption the most, but so do customers, especially if they were used to working with certain individuals at your company. Unfortunately, this discontinuity can have unintended ripple effects. Mitigating turnover can help reduce these gaps in both employee performance and the customer experience.
Reducing "Regrettable Attrition" and Knowledge Loss
Research from McKinsey found that high performers can be a whopping 800% more productive than their counterparts. When these key employees leave, the impact is felt immediately. Their output is gone, and so is their momentum. That’s why many employee retention and engagement strategies prioritize “regrettable attrition” as its own metric, the amount of critical employees who have left the organization.
Creating Stability for Growth and Hiring Efficiency
Another reason you don’t want excess turnover is because of the burden it places on recruiters, the unsung heroes keeping your organization running. If recruiters have to keep filling the same roles, they’ll always be playing catch-up when their time could be better spent filling strategic roles rather than backfilling seats.
What Causes Employees to Leave (so you can retain them)
Preventable vs. Unpreventable Turnover
Some turnover is inevitable, but the goal is to shrink the preventable portion, the people who would have stayed if the experience, role, or manager relationship had just been a little bit different.
The Most Common Drivers of Turnover
Common causes of turnover include:
Cultural mismatch
When employees feel out of sync with an organization’s culture or values, they can feel disconnected and unsupported. Over time, they look for somewhere they "fit" better.
Bad hiring practices
Poor communication, lengthy feedback periods, and untrained interviewers can lead to a bad candidate experience, which can sour the employee experience, causing them to resign early.
Lack of career development opportunities
When employees see limited opportunities for career growth and advancement, they may become frustrated and seek other employment.
Workplace conflict
No one wants to work in a toxic environment. Conflicts with coworkers, managers, and leaders can create an unhealthy workplace. Even small tensions (uneven workload, favoritism, unclear ownership) can drain morale and push employees away.
Poor compensation or benefits
Low wages and a lack of employee benefits can lead to dissatisfaction and financial stress. Even when pay is competitive, unclear pay decisions or inconsistent promotion criteria can erode trust.
How to Diagnose your Biggest Retention Risks
If you want to improve your employee retention and engagement strategies, the first step is to determine why your employees are leaving. Some simple and effective ways to gauge turnover causes are to:
- Use pulse surveys to spot trends in workload, clarity, recognition, and manager effectiveness
- Conduct stay interviews to surface risk early
- Evaluate exit interviews to identify patterns by role, tenure, and manager
We’ll go over these in more detail in the next section.
The Best Employee Retention Strategies (15 tactics you can implement)
Some employees will resign. That’s inevitable. Your goal is to reduce preventable attrition, especially among high performers and scarce talent. To do so, you need a mix of retention strategies: different programs and tactics across development, compensation, culture, management, and more.
Here are the fifteen best practices and employee retention strategies you can start using today to reduce attrition and boost employee engagement and wellbeing.
1. Build a Clear Career Development Path (the #1 long-term retention lever)
If you want people to stay, they need to be able to picture a future with you. They need to know there’s room to grow and that you’re committed to their development.
So, give them that picture. Paint a career path and make the qualifications for the next steps crystal clear. You should also prioritize internal mobility whenever possible. If new hires are getting the best positions, employees may feel like they need to leave the company to get a new challenge.
Things to focus on:
- Identify employees natural abilities and skills with Wonderlic Develop
- Map out career paths and skill requirements for key roles.
- Prioritize internal mobility and reward managers who develop talent.
- Use mentorship and stretch assignments to help people build skills in context.
- Revisit individual development plans (IDPs) on a regular cadence (more than just once a year).
2. Strengthen Manager Effectiveness
McKinsey found that the employee-manager relationship accounts for 86% of employee satisfaction. When this relationship is strained, employees are likely to feel dissatisfied and disengaged.
Unfortunately, most managers are high-performing individual contributors who never received formal management training. It’s understandable, but it can absolutely affect retention, especially when micromanaging creeps in (a very easy trap for highly ambitious managers who want everything done “right”).
One important solution is to develop a coaching management style. Great coaching, Gallup says, “is an ongoing relationship of support and trust that emerges out of a rhythm of collaborative conversations, leading to teamwork and shared accountability.” The key theme is support and a give-and-take relationship.
Things to focus on:
- Have regular 1-1 meetings.
- Maintain clear feedback loops.
- Develop coaching skills and a supportive leadership style.
- Set clear expectations and have fewer “fire drills.”
- Shifting performance reviews from evaluation to coaching
3. Clarify Expectations
Only 47% of employees strongly agree they know what’s expected of them at work, down from 61% in 2015. When expectations are fuzzy, employees may not deliver what they’re supposed to. Worse, constantly “moving the goal post” can lead to low engagement and burnout. Clear expectations help employees feel like they have control over their careers and progression.
Things to focus on:
- Define what “good” looks like for a role.
- Make responsibilities visible and let employees know when they should escalate something.
- Keep goals consistent long enough for employees to reach them.
4. Pay Fairly and Communicate Compensation Clearly
Work can be deeply fulfilling. It’s where we spend most of our lives. But for a lot of people, a top concern will always be compensation and pay. Making sure that employees are paid fairly goes a long way toward retaining them.
Things to focus on:
- Run regular market reviews for key roles.
- Create transparent pay bands and promotion criteria.
- Train managers to have productive compensation conversations.
5. Offer Meaningful Recognition (not just "employee of the month")
Over half of all employees (55%) don’t receive any recognition from their workplace. However, Gallup found that well-recognized employees were 45% less likely to have changed organizations two years later, making recognition and appreciation one of the most effective strategies to improve employee retention.
Types of recognition to focus on:
- Timely recognition: Ensure recognition happens close to achievement.
- Specific recognition: Point out what great looks like, and make people feel seen and appreciated when they deliver it.
- Peer recognition: Some of the best recognition can come from teammates. Consider setting up monthly or quarterly peer awards.
- Value recognition: Recognize specific behaviors and values you want to be part of your culture to reinforce them for everyone.
6. Create Flexible Work Policies Employees Actually Trust
Flexibility helps retention. Period. If policies are too stringent and inflexible, such as not letting employees leave a second before 5 pm, you may end up pushing employees away.
Also, make sure your policies are consistent. Allowing employees to work fully remotely, then hybrid only, then demanding five days in the office can be jarring. Before making any major change, explain the rationale behind the decision and give employees plenty of notice beforehand.
Things to focus on:
- Set clear organizational norms, such as when it’s okay to leave for the day.
- Create consistency across teams so rules don’t depend on who you report to.
- Promote fairness for on-site roles, such as shift priority and time off.
7. Upgrade Onboarding so New Hires Stay Past 90 Days
Did you know 30% of new hires leave within just 90 days? People often join companies with energy and enthusiasm. Then, if they feel lost or surprised by what the role actually is, they quit.
Cultural and job mismatches can be largely mitigated with the right pre-hire assessments. But if you’ve already hired someone, the next best step is to set them up for success. And that all comes down to your onboarding experience.
Things to focus on:
- Develop a “buddy program” to help new hires navigate the workplace and culture. This can look like a peer who’s simply there to answer questions, such as: “Where do we keep the snacks and coffee?”
- Have daily check-ins during a new hire’s first week and weekly check-ins afterward.
- Implement a team communication and employee development tool, like Wonderlic Team Dynamics, which can help managers better understand the communication style of new hires and how they best mesh with your team.
8. Invest in Learning and Upskilling (especially for high performers)
A study from Microsoft found that business leaders’ top priority through 2026 and beyond will be upskilling their workforce. Why? Because success with AI means having a highly skilled force.
Employees know this, too, and they’re looking to you to help them grow in their careers and skill set. So, give employees the opportunity and resources to develop the skills that will help your organization while helping your employees grow in their careers. It may just stop someone from leaving.
Things to focus on:
- Tie learning to business outcomes and role requirements.
- Schedule protected learning time during the week.
- Reward skill growth with promotions or new projects and responsibilities.
- Give high performers stretch work so they don’t get bored or stagnant.
9. Improve Internal Communication and Psychological Safety
While every team is different, there are commonalities between high-performing ones. Google’s Project Aristotle found that high-performing teams featured unusually high levels of psychological safety, defined as “feeling confident about admitting mistakes, asking questions, or offering new ideas.”
A necessary component of psychological safety is open communication, a communication style where individuals feel free to share thoughts and ideas without judgment or reprisal. Focusing on healthy, open communication, psychological safety, and strong team dynamics will help foster trust, which will help retain your best and brightest employees.
Things to focus on:
- Maintain open communication with employees on your team.
- Really listen to employees. Hear their concerns, desires, and blockers. Then, act on that feedback.
- Make it safe to raise issues early so they don’t snowball.
- Share the “why” behind major decisions that will affect your employees.
10. Conduct Stay Interviews to Prevent Surprise Resignations
By the time you conduct an exit interview and figure out what went wrong, it’s often too late. A better solution is a stay interview, a proactive meeting with an employee designed to surface what’s working, what isn’t, and what might cause an employee to leave if not addressed.
These interviews don’t have to be formal. They can be normal conversations baked into a 1-1. Just make sure to be supportive and responsive.
Things to focus on:
- Run stay interviews regularly. Once a year may be sufficient, but you should do it at least twice a year for critical roles.
- Ask consistent questions, such as what employees like best about their roles, what drains their energy, and what would make them leave.
- Make sure to respond to employee feedback. These interviews can become disadvantageous if employees share meaningful feedback and their concerns are never addressed.
11. Support Wellbeing and Sustainable Performance
SHRM’s 2026 State of the Workplace report shows that addressing stress and burnout is one of the most pressing workplace needs today. The good news is that employing other strategies for employee retention, such as strengthening employee-manager relationships and offering flexible work policies, will automatically lead to less stress and burnout. However, that doesn't mean it hurts to actively address these issues that cause so many employees to resign.
In addition to offering company-wide wellness benefits, you can:
- Minimize constant urgency.
- Ensure employees have a healthy workload.
- Set clear priorities so employees aren’t juggling three “top priorities” at once.
- Properly resource critical projects.
- Train managers to spot burnout patterns early, such as lack of engagement or strings of sick days.
12. Create a Retention Plan for your Critical Roles
Not all turnover is equally painful. Losing a leader, high performer, or scarce technical role can be far more costly than other positions. In fact, some research shows that high performers can be 800% more productive than their peers. Losing that productivity is a big hit.
To combat this, you should develop a critical-role retention plan. It can be straightforward, but the most important thing is creating and acting on it.
Things to focus on:
- Identify critical roles, whether due to impact or scarcity.
- Identify turnover indicators for these roles, such as workload spikes or pay stagnation.
- Build succession and internal talent pipelines to combat turnover.
- Run regular stay interviews and development check-ins more often for these roles.
- Focus on employee retention strategies specifically geared toward these roles.
13. Strengthen Team Connection and Belonging
Peer relationships account for 39% of employees’ job satisfaction, and that’s even higher when you account for manager relationships, both of which are parts of healthy team dynamics, an integral part of any employee retention strategy.
Promote healthy team dynamics by:
- Establishing psychological safety and open communication
- Making sure everyone is included in team activities and functions
- Encouraging cross-functional collaboration so teams don’t become islands
- Creating regular team rituals, such as weekly meetings and peer shout-outs
14. Reduce Friction (tools, processes, approvals) that Drains Motivation
Friction is death (or resignation) by a thousand paper cuts. Maybe it’s the legacy software that takes forever to load or the outdated policies that create unnecessary busywork. People can become so fed up with the little things that they eventually quit, and this big thing could be avoided if roadblocks were removed.
Things to focus on:
- Ask teams quarterly what slows them down the most and eats up their time.
- Pick the top three friction points.
- Fix those friction points, whether they’re approval processes, broken tools, duplicated work, or unclear processes.
- Celebrate friction removal as real leadership work.
15. Track What Works and Iterate (retention is a system)
Retention can't be a one-and-done initiative. It has to be integrated into your overall talent strategy and revisited regularly. So, to measure the effectiveness of your employee retention strategies, track which strategies you’re using and the important metrics tied to them. Then, revisit those metrics on a regular basis and adjust your employee retention strategies as needed.
Important metrics you can track:
- Turnover rate and cost
- Regrettable attrition
- Recognition quality/frequency
- Manager effectiveness (e.g., how often you have 1-1s and what people are saying in their exit interviews)
- Internal mobility and development progress
How to Build a Retention Strategy, Step-by-Step
If you’re looking for HR strategies for employee retention, this section will help you take the first step toward building a repeatable, measurable employee retention strategy that you can start using today.
Step 1: Identify - Who are you Losing and Where?
Start by getting specific with your attrition. For example, company-wide averages can mask bigger retention issues isolated to specific teams or managers. So, break down turnover by:
- Role family (sales, marketing, etc.)
- Team / manager
- Length of employment (0–90 days, 3–12 months, 12–18 months, 2+ years)
- Location/shift (especially for frontline and remote teams)
- Performance level (regrettable attrition vs. expected attrition)
- Critical roles (scarce skills, high-impact leadership positions)
Step 2: Diagnose - Figure out Why you're Losing Them
Next, figure out why employees are leaving. Your goal is to isolate the top three factors. Mitigation will come next. To diagnose turnover, you can use:
- Pulse surveys
- Stay and exit interviews
- Internal mobility patterns
- Reviews and comments from third-party sites like Glassdoor and Reddit
Step 3: Choose Initiatives - Prioritize Quick Wins + Structural Fixes
Making quick changes may just save a handful of employees from leaving, even in the first two to six weeks. These quick, high-impact actions include:
- Clarifying role expectations
- Improving feedback cadence and quality
- Improving recognition frequency
- Fixing one or two workflow blockers (friction)
Changes at the organizational level take longer, sometimes months to years, but they’re what will improve your turnover long-term. These strategies include:
- Manager training and enablement
- Career pathing and creating personalized employee development plans
- Designing jobs with healthy workloads
- Optimizing pay bands and clarifying promotion criteria
- Using development tools that track progress and make that progress visible to employees and managers
Step 4: Operationalize - Owners, Timelines, Manager Enablement
Unless retention has an ultimate owner (accountability), it won’t be improved. However, you can divvy up your retention programs to different employees, making different HR and talent leaders responsible for a certain program, such as onboarding, compensation, manager enablement, etc. This helps improve each facet over time without overwhelming any single team member.
For each retention program, just make sure you define:
- An owner
- A timeline
- What success looks like (key metrics or outcomes)
Step 5: Measure - Leading vs. Lagging Indicators
Measuring your efforts is how you know whether they’re working. The catch is that different retention metrics can behave differently. While some may improve immediately, others can take months or years to improve, so it can be helpful to separate lagging indicators (outcomes) from leading indicators (predictors).
An important note is that quitting is a lagging indicator. It’s an outcome, and by the time someone resigns, it’s usually too late to do anything about it. Following the leading indicators (the symptoms) can help you prevent turnover in the first place.
Lagging indicators (the outcomes you want to improve) include:
- Voluntary turnover
- Regrettable attrition
- Early turnover (first 90 days)
Leading indicators (the early signs of attrition):
- Clarity around responsibilities and expectations
- Recognition quality and frequency
- Feedback cadence
- Signs of burnout
- Internal mobility and career development progress/availability
For each metric you track, set a baseline and measure changes monthly or quarterly. It can also be helpful to separate metrics by team, role, and manager for more granular data. Finally, share those results with your talent and HR leaders regularly with the goal of improving your employee retention strategies.
Why Employee Development is a Retention Strategy (and how to make it real)
Development Increases Motivation, Internal Mobility and Commitment
Personalized growth and development plans show employees you’re invested in them, that you want them around for the long haul. Employee development also supports internal mobility. Instead of losing high-performing employees because they feel stuck, you can give them a concrete, transparent way to grow into a new role, earn new responsibilities, build new skills, and take the next step in their career journey without leaving the company.
What to Implement: Skill-building Plans, Coaching, Progress Visibility
The best development plans are holistic. They help employees improve at their jobs by, yes, elevating their technical skill sets, but also by improving their role-critical attributes. For a customer support representative, this might look like working on their professionalism or communication. For a manager, it could be developing their coaching or decision-making capabilities.
Turning Development into a Measurable System (not a one-off initiative)
The problem with many development plans is that the goals are loose and employee progress is only reviewed once or twice a year, if that. Unfortunately, this turns development into an afterthought that isn’t tied to career progression. Development becomes something employees need to squeeze in around other priorities.
Development becomes impactful when it’s baked into the everyday rhythms of work: 1:1s with managers, regular feedback cycles, internal mobility conversations, and more. When employees know their development is being invested in and seen by their managers, they know their work is taking them somewhere. Managers also gain a clearer view of what’s working and where their employees still have room to grow. Some employee development tools are even self-led, which helps busy managers and ambitious employees.
Explore Wonderlic Develop for structured employee development
Wonderlic Develop is a science-based employee development tool that measures cognitive abilities, personality, and motivation to give employees and managers a personalized roadmap for growth specific to an employee’s role. With clear targets and actionable insights, employees and their managers gain a personalized plan to build competencies, propel career advancement, and improve performance in a way that’s consistent and measurable.
See how Wonderlic Develop can help you reduce turnover
Hire best-fit candidates with Wonderlic Select
Finally, retention starts with making the right hiring decisions. A bad hire is likely to remain a poor fit for the duration of their tenure. A good fit, on the other hand, can grow into a high performer and become an integral part of your workforce.
Wonderlic Select is a multi-measure pre-hire assessment that uses the latest industrial-organizational psychology to evaluate candidate fit for any role. Select helps your hiring managers and recruiters make objective, science-backed hiring decisions and sets employees up for success from day one.
See how Wonderlic Select can help you make the right hiring decision the first time, every time
Start retaining and developing your best employees today
Improving employee retention is rarely about a single strategy or “fix.” It has to be well-rounded and intentional, focused on improving multiple parts of the employee experience that improve wellbeing and satisfaction. Once you start treating retention as a foundational part of your talent strategy, you’ll start reducing preventable turnover and keep great people around long enough for performance and culture to compound.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Employee Retention Strategies?
Employee retention strategies are the deliberate actions HR leaders and managers take to keep employees from quitting, such as strengthening manager effectiveness, improving onboarding, clarifying career paths, and building a better day-to-day employee experience.
Why are Employee Retention Strategies Important?
Turnover is expensive and disruptive, and a meaningful chunk of it is preventable. With the right innovative employee retention strategies, you can reduce turnover costs, ease the rehiring burden on recruiters and managers, and keep great employees around long enough to build momentum. Personalized employee development can take employee performance and retention even further.
What are the Best Employee Retention Strategies?
The best strategies to increase employee retention are the ones that address the real drivers of turnover at your organization. The highest impact strategies center around career development, employee engagement, and healthy team dynamics.
How do you Measure whether Retention Strategies are Working?
Track lagging indicators, like voluntary turnover and regrettable attrition, as well as leading indicators, like recognition frequency and burnout. For each metric you track, set a baseline and measure changes monthly or quarterly. It can be helpful to separate metrics by team, role, and manager so company averages don’t hide deeper issues within certain teams.
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