Glossary: HR & Recruiting Definitions
Employee retention is considered an important element of recruitment and serves to maintain the attractiveness of the employer or company through promotional measures. It’s all about building a strong emotional bond, or loyalty, from employee to employer, which should secure employee commitment in the long term. Therefore, employee retention further helps contribute to achieving the company’s long term goals.
Employee retention is aimed at both acquired talent and talent that is yet to be recruited. It has a strong impact on the employer image and can be considered a sub-discipline of employer branding.
The basic premise for actively and purposefully retaining employees is built on the hypothesis that employees who are happy and content at work will not consider changing jobs. Ideally, they also won’t be as receptive to active poaching attempts by other companies.
In addition to these positives, content employees are often more motivated, and therefore more productive. As well as this, if employers manage to retain employees over a long period of time, they will benefit from a lower staff turnover rate.
As long tenures are rare in today’s workplace—especially within the fast-moving start-up scene—this, in turn, has a positive impact on the employer’s image. It suggests that employees’ expectations were met, or even exceeded, when they joined the company. This makes it much easier to attract more talent of a higher quality.
Retention measures offer high performers positive incentives to stay with a company. In addition to having a better employee retention rate, organisations may also benefit from:
How loyal employees are to a company depends primarily on how satisfied employees are with their choice of position and employer. Satisfaction is measured by how valued and supported employees feel within the organisation and is built on several criteria.
In order to successfully retain employees, these points, in particular, must be ensured to a degree that is satisfactory for employees:
Both HR managers and leaders within departments and teams are responsible for identifying and initiating appropriate measures to strengthen employee retention.
Since they work with the same people on a daily basis, leaders usually recognise declines in employee satisfaction much earlier than HR managers and can thus initiate improvements in a more targeted and needs-based manner.
Companies that want to improve their employee retention should focus on these four measures:
Firstly, a company should be clear about how it wants to be perceived externally. This vision should then guide all conceivable employee retention measures.
Employee satisfaction enables conclusions to be drawn about the likelihood of upcoming job changes. For this reason, regular and anonymous surveys and feedback from employees are a good indicator of the need for retention measures.
The reasons for employee dissatisfaction can vary massively. In order to facilitate employee retention across the board, measures should be tailored to individual employees (e.g. promotion or sabbatical), teams (e.g. team events or feedback rounds) or the entire workforce (e.g. more holiday allowance).
Employee retention rate provides information on the success of the measures mentioned above. This can be determined monthly, quarterly or annually depending on your organisation’s size and goals.
The repetition and evaluation of surveys should also be used to monitor success. Higher satisfaction should also result in a higher retention rate. If this is not the case, improvements may have to be made.
Simplify your hiring process and workflow
Understand how to create job ads that actually work. Leverage winning strategies to best promote ads. Find the ideal candidate faster.
Already have an account? Sign in
Similar terms
Related to “E”
Similar terms
Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance describes the balance between your work and your personal life. Getting this balance right provides greater satisfaction for your employees.
ViewEmployer Branding
Employer branding is the practice of managing and influencing your employer brand to attract, recruit and retain employees.
ViewOnboarding
Onboarding refers to the process of introducing and integrating a new employee into an organization.
View