Employee Retention: 12 Strategies to Retain Employees

How can your company avoid turnover and hold onto top talent? Here are 12 data-backed strategies to keep employees from leaving.

Keeping good people is one of the hardest parts of running a team, and it’s about far more than a paycheck. Gallup’s 2022 survey of more than 13,000 U.S. workers asked what would actually make them jump to a new job. The top three answers:

• Better pay and benefits (64%)
• More work-life balance (61%)
• Jobs aligned with their strengths (58%)

Do you notice that better pay edges out work-life balance by only 3 points, and “doing work I’m good at” by only 6? Paying more is one option among several.

Here are 12 data-backed strategies to keep your best people from walking out the door.

Top 7 Reasons Employees Quit Their Job

Before you can keep someone, you have to know what sends them packing.

Replacing a person is expensive. U.S. small businesses spend an average of roughly $1,900 per employee a year on training alone, and every new hire has to be walked up that curve from zero. The turnover bill on top of it is harder to pin down: an older Bureau of National Affairs estimate, reported by Forbes in 2013, put U.S. losses at over $11 billion a year.

So why do people actually quit? Here’s what the data keeps pointing at:

• Toxic company culture: In a 2022 survey of 1,000 U.S. employees who resigned that year, over 30% pointed straight at toxic culture as their number-one reason. Discrimination, verbal abuse, sloppy communication, sexual harassment—none of it belongs anywhere near a workplace that wants people to stay.

• Problems with management: In a 2021 survey of nearly 2,000 employees across 15+ industries, 63% of the people who described their manager as bad said they were thinking about leaving within the next 12 months.

• Lack of appreciation: People check out when they don’t feel valued. In a 2017 OfficeTeam survey, two-thirds of workers said they’d likely leave a job where they didn’t feel appreciated, up from 51% in 2012.

• Low pay: Among U.S. workers who quit a job in 2021, 63% told Pew Research Center that low pay was one of the reasons. With the cost of living climbing, people are shopping for the best pay their skills can command.

• Feeling burnt out: When budgets get cut and the stakes stay high, work-life balance is the first thing to crumble, and burnout follows close behind. People start hunting for lower-stress jobs. In Deloitte’s 2022 survey of 23,220 Gen Zs and millennials across 46 countries, 46% of Gen Zs and 45% of millennials said they felt burned out, and those who had changed employers in the previous two years named burnout as one of their top three reasons for leaving.

• No flexible work options: When the world shifted online in 2020, people stopped treating a desk as a requirement. Flexibility is now something they expect: when it’s offered, 87% of American workers take it, according to a 2022 McKinsey and Ipsos survey of 25,000 people. A job without it is a harder sell.

• Lack of career advancement opportunities: In that same Pew survey of 965 people who quit in 2021, 63% named a lack of advancement opportunities as a reason too. People want to feel like the job they’re in is actually going somewhere.

How to Retain Good Employees: 12 Science-Backed Tips

Keeping good people isn’t a dark art.

As an owner or a manager, you can reshape your workplace with the right systems, incentives, and leadership habits. And the better your communication and people skills get, the faster you build a place people actually want to stay in.

Here are the top retention strategies, and they work for companies of every size.

Fix Hiring and Onboarding First

Dig into why someone quit inside their first year and you’ll often find the same story: wrong expectations set in the interview, a thin first week, and nobody assigned to show them how the place actually works. Three months later they’re gone, and everyone calls it a “bad fit.”

A 2015 Brandon Hall Group research brief reported that organizations with a strong employee onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%. It’s a vendor-commissioned benchmark rather than a controlled study, so treat the exact numbers as directional. The direction is worth acting on anyway: the best investment you can make in retention starts before the person shows up.

Take a hard look at how you hire, onboard, and train, and you’ll probably spot the gaps—places where a bad fit should’ve been caught early and slipped through anyway. Ask yourself:

• Do your job descriptions accurately portray the position?
• Do you make it easy for the employee to learn tasks?
• Are you properly vetting applicants based on their attitudes, enthusiasm, and capabilities?
• Are you hiring overqualified people for a job where they’ll quickly get bored?
• Does your initial training cover the full range of job tasks and expectations?
• Is the overall experience for a new employee sluggishly slow or fast-paced and exciting?
• Do you offer opportunities for unique connections, such as onboarding lunches or new employee welcoming traditions?

These fixes can feel small and fiddly, but they’re what gets the right people in the door and off to a strong start. An employee’s first impression of your company sets the tone for everything that follows.

Action Step: Audit your job descriptions, interview process, and first-week training as one connected system. Write descriptions that honestly reflect the day-to-day role (overselling a job is a fast track to early turnover), and build a structured onboarding plan that covers the full scope of the role instead of leaving new hires to figure it out alone.

Get People Genuinely Engaged

Engagement and retention move together. People want to feel like their work matters, with a real thread connecting them to the mission that gives them skin in the game.

Gallup’s Q12 meta-analysis pooled 736 studies covering more than 183,000 work units across 90 countries, then compared the most-engaged quarter of business units against the least-engaged quarter. The median gaps:

• 21% less turnover in high-turnover organizations, and 51% less in low-turnover ones
• 18% higher productivity in sales
• 23% higher profitability

Before you quote those numbers at a board meeting, note that Gallup built the instrument, ran the analysis, and sells the survey, so read the effect sizes as in-house figures rather than independent ones. Stress is the other half of the picture. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace reporting shows it spiked during the pandemic years and has since come down from that peak, though it’s still running above where it sat before 2020.

Action Step: Try the ideas in How to Motivate Employees: 12 Science-Backed Strategies, which start from autonomy, competence, and connection rather than perks. Easy ways to start:

• Promote workplace friendships by setting up a birthday calendar and new birthday traditions
• Change up your work environment or encourage employees to personalize their workspace
• Learn each of your colleague’s goals and cheer them on

Show People They’re Seen

It should be no surprise that recognition keeps people around.

A 2022–2024 Gallup and Workhuman study that tracked nearly 3,500 employees found the ones who got high-quality recognition were 45% less likely to have left after two years. When people feel genuinely seen, they have a reason to keep showing up.

Not everyone feels appreciated the same way, though. Dr. Gary Chapman found there are 5 appreciation languages. Learn your colleague’s language so you can support them the way they actually want to be supported:

Who wants to grind away 40 hours a week for a boss who never once notices the extra mile? Appreciation is like the fuel that keeps team morale up. Without it, people quickly become disengaged and start looking elsewhere.

Real gratitude does something bigger, too. It makes someone feel like a valued part of the team, and it quietly builds a culture of trust and recognition that other people want in on.

Action Step: Here are 30 Fun Ways to Make Employees Feel Valued & Appreciated. Public praise? Little notes of appreciation? Delivered food? Team retreats? Yes, please.

Reward the People Who Go Hard

If recognition is the fuel, rewards are the road-trip snacks. Recognition keeps the car running. The snacks keep the driver happy, focused, and actually enjoying the ride.

In a 2018 survey of 1,724 workers by the recognition-software firm Achievers, 69% named rewards and recognition as one of the top two things that would motivate them to stay with their current employer, just behind interesting work at 74%. The vendor has a stake in that answer, so read it as one signal rather than a settled finding.

Action Step: Rewards for high achievers can come as bonuses, promotions, gifts, team-building experiences, or retreats. Here are the 43 Best Employee Appreciation ideas by Industry, plus How to Announce a Promotion (The Fun Way). Some easy ones:

• Have team members write a short note highlighting their coworkers’ successes
• Host a private holiday party that treats your staff like VIPs
• Invite remote workers for a virtual happy hour and mixology class
• Gift your team company swag

Communicate Like It Matters (Because It Does)

In a 2019 survey of 1,001 U.S. employees, 80% said ineffective company communication left them feeling stressed.

And communication is everything: handing out a task, sharing a project update, giving someone feedback. How you talk to your team—on a call or across the desk—shapes their motivation, their performance, and how they feel about the whole place. Leave people confused about their work or feeling disrespected by the boss, and they’ll start looking elsewhere.

So what does good communication at work actually look like? A few things:

• Clarity: Whether it’s an email or an off-the-cuff answer, the message is clean and obvious. No energy wasted decoding confusing instructions. People know what to do, how to do it, and when it’s due.
• Two-way communication: Feedback and opinions flow both directions, from the team and from management. Instead of feeling “talked at” by the boss, people feel free to say what they think.
• Respectful: No matter who you’re talking to or how, the tone stays professional and respectful. That means no blowups, no profanity, no condescending edge.
• Conflict resolution: When problems arise, higher management should have systems and methods for resolving the conflict. Managers remain solutions-oriented and never point fingers or cast blame on staff members.

Action Step: Here are 10 Effective Ways You Can Improve Your Communication Skills to teach everyone on your team. As a leader, you can learn to use the power of small communication cues to improve your relationship with your employees. Vanessa Van Edwards’ book Cues can help you become a master at charismatic communication in the workplace and beyond.

Give People a Reason to Climb

When people feel stuck in a “dead end” job, they start acting like it.

Gallup lists opportunities to learn and grow among the core drivers of engagement, and engaged people are likelier to stay. People who can’t see a path forward stop picturing a future with you at all.

Career development sharpens day-to-day performance, and it hands someone a reason to keep climbing.

It also tends to feed on itself. You invest in your people to show you care where their careers are headed. They get to learn new things and work toward bigger roles, and they feel more loyal to the place that invested in them.

Action Step: Professional development can be as simple as a weekly communication exercise or starting a team book club. Consider hosting a monthly workshop with a relevant professional to help employees learn new skills. You can also set aside funds to send your staff to annual conferences in your industry. Consider:

• Bringing in a speaker to train your team on soft skills that would make their job easier
• Buying a helpful book for the entire team to read together
• Creating career development plans for each of your top team members

Pair Them Up With a Mentor

A mentorship program is one of the best professional development benefits because it’s:

• Productive: Pair an experienced staffer with a less experienced one and the whole team’s productivity tends to rise.
• Relatively cheap: You probably already have the veterans on hand to take the newbies under their wing.
• Job-focused: Instead of chasing skills outside the office, mentorship happens day to day and week to week, on the actual work the person was hired to do.

Mentorship tends to help retention from both ends. New hires feel like someone’s got their back. And your long-timers? They often rediscover a spark in their own job once they get to teach someone coming up behind them.

Action Step: Whether you want to directly mentor employees or group them with your most experienced staff, define specific goals for every mentorship pairing. Do you want the mentor to help the employee get more efficient at a particular task? Can you pair your employee with a mentor who shares their interests or holds a position they’ve expressed interest in? Just keep mentorships mutually beneficial. Learn these Coaching Techniques for Employees: 6 Paths to All-Star Status.

Build a Culture People Brag About

Culture is one of the biggest pieces of a healthy workplace. And for younger workers especially, the overall vibe of the job is what they care about most.

“[Company] culture is freedom of expression, freedom of creativity, and, of course, from organization to organization there are these subtle nuances, but generally to us, that’s what it means.”

—Zach Suchin

If you want to attract the right people, you have to define what your culture actually is. Take Lululemon Athletica, the Canadian athleisure company built around wellness and personal growth.

Their culture is in the details: free yoga and fitness classes, professional development coaching, healthy snacks in the breakroom. That mindful, yoga-flavored vibe shows in who they hire and keep. They attract people who are genuinely fired up about what the brand stands for.

Action Step: Learn How to Create an Incredible Company Culture with Exceptional Hiring with Zach Suchin and watch the video for more insights:

Protect Their Life Outside Work

Strip away work-life balance and people get stressed, irritable, and wobbly on whether this job is even worth it.

Burned-out, overextended people don’t stick around, as the Deloitte figures above show. Nearly half of the Gen Zs and millennials in that 2022 global survey said they felt burned out by the intensity of their workload.

So what does baking balance into your culture look like? A few moves:

• Check-ins to prevent work overload or overwhelm
• An “open door” policy to discuss situations where work is impeding employees’ wellbeing
• Flexible policies that allow people the freedom to create their schedule
• Avoid discussing work topics at lunch or happy hour
• Clearly defined work hours (especially for remote teams)
• Taking company-wide vacations so everyone is offline at the same time and no one feels pressured to check in

Action Step: Balance starts at the top. If you’re the manager who skips your kid’s play to stay at the office, or fires off work texts at 10 p.m., you’re quietly teaching your team to do the same.

Fix your own balance first. Then pass what you learn down to your people. Start with How to Fight Burnout and Get Unstuck in 13 Empowering Steps.

Invest in Their Health (Honestly)

Investing in your people’s health tells them you care about more than their output.

Now, a fair warning before you go crunching the ROI. A widely quoted 2010 meta-analysis in Health Affairs reported that medical costs fell about $3.27 and absenteeism costs about $2.73 for every dollar spent on wellness programs, which is where the six-to-one figure comes from. The evidence since then is genuinely mixed. The Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, a randomized trial of nearly 5,000 university employees published in 2019, found no significant effect on medical spending, health behaviors, or employee productivity over more than two years of follow-up.

So don’t bank on guaranteed dollar savings. The more reliable payoff is cultural. People tend to be happier, less stressed, and more engaged when their company shows it actually cares about how they’re doing.

Wellness programs can include:

• Free health screenings
• Nutritional education
• Group workout classes or gym memberships
• On-site healthy food options
• Mindfulness and meditation app subscriptions
• Tobacco cessation programs
• Weight loss programs
• Personal or life coaching

Action Step: Help your workers stay healthier so they can be happier at work. Try implementing a new employee wellness program using this guide. Don’t forget to ask for feedback and focus on wellness experiences your team is genuinely interested in.

Tell Them How They’re Doing—Often

In a 2019 survey, over 90% of U.S. workers said they want performance feedback more often than once a year. An annual review is the bar a lot of workplaces are clearing, and barely. Motivation and feedback are tightly linked, and casual weekly or monthly check-ins catch the big problems and the little workflow snags while they’re still small.

Action Step: If you don’t already, organize weekly or bi-weekly check-ins with every employee. Consider taking a casual walk around the building or chatting on Zoom to keep it a low-pressure, free-flowing conversation. Ask every team member:

• How are your current projects going?
• What kind of assistance (if any) do you need from me?
• In what ways can I better support you?

Give Them Autonomy, With Guardrails

ADP’s 2021 survey of more than 32,000 workers across 17 countries found 67% felt empowered to take advantage of flexible working at their company, up from 26% before the pandemic. But flexibility is the surface of it. As Harvard Business Review put it, what people are really after is autonomy.

Nobody wants a boss policing their calendar. People want the freedom to manage their own time and shape their own day. That’s one of the biggest reasons remote work caught fire.

Hand someone that autonomy and you’re telling them you trust them, without hovering or looking over their shoulder. Let people own their work and engagement and job satisfaction tend to follow.

Action Step: If remote work is possible for your company, reference these 13 tips for managing remote employees so you can adequately manage a partially remote or fully-remote team.

If you need to have people on-site, see if there are ways you can add more flexibility in scheduling and task assignments.

For example, instead of mapping out exactly what a team member will do on a given day, give them a list of priorities for the week and let them design their own schedule. You can also give people more freedom over their break and lunch times.

Key Takeaways: Employee Retention is All About An Enjoyable Work Environment

People stay because they genuinely like working for you. They leave when they feel bored, disrespected, or taken for granted. The keys to keeping your best people:

• Fix hiring and onboarding first: Audit your job descriptions, interview process, and first-week training as one system this quarter, so every new hire starts on a clear, well-supported footing.
• Improve employee engagement: Make sure people get to focus on their “zone of genius.” Assign them projects they’re legitimately interested in.
• Prioritize communication: Put communication training in front of every level of management, and hold the tone to professional and respectful even when the news is bad.
• Invest in employee success: Offer professional development and demonstrate that you care about your workers’ career trajectories.
• Encourage wellness and balance: Prevent burnout by setting a good example and creating employee wellness programs. Healthy workers tend to be happier and less stressed, and happier workers tend to be more engaged and less likely to quit.

There’s truth in the old saying that people don’t quit their job, they quit their boss. If you want to level up your leadership and keep more of your team around, start here: How to Be a Good Boss with Immediate Actionable Steps.