8 Ways To Reduce Turnover and Improve Employee Retention

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Great companies, big and small, are built with the talents of their people. When employees leave, it’s not just an inconvenience; high turnover has a direct and significant impact on a company's productivity, team morale, customer satisfaction, and overall reputation.

No business is immune to staff turnover. But there’s a world of difference between an occasional resignation and a revolving door of unhappy employees.

By implementing thoughtful strategies and demonstrating a genuine commitment to your team's well-being, you can significantly reduce turnover and boost retention. Here are eight actionable ways to encourage your employees to stay with your company for the long term.

How High Turnover Affects Your Company

While a certain amount of turnover is normal in any organization, too much turnover can cost you:

  • Finances: Replacing an employee is much more expensive than retaining an existing productive employee.

  • Productivity and Performance: High turnover hurts productivity and sales, and often results in lower quality of work.

  • Company Knowledge: Losing an experienced employee often means losing the insight and expertise they’ve honed over the years. 

  • Employee Morale: Turnover can hurt employee morale and overwhelm team members who are asked to take on the work of departing staff.

  • Brand Reputation: High turnover can damage an organization’s reputation with both customers and potential new employees.

  • Customer Experience: Staffing shortages can lead to production delays and a poor customer experience. In addition, dealing with inexperienced staff can be a source of frustration for customers.

When you look at the cost of high turnover, I think you’ll agree that retaining existing productive employees is a much better use of your company’s time, energy, and money!

What Impacts Employee Retention?

Why do employees leave? The reasons for this can be as varied as the stars in the sky. But some of the root causes of high turnover can include:

  • Ineffective management

  • Lack of job advancement opportunities

  • Poor work-life balance

  • Inflexible work arrangements

  • Lack of employee recognition

  • Feeling disconnected

The good news: Retaining great employees isn’t complicated. The key lies in addressing these common issues.

Employees are much more likely to stick around for the long term if they feel they belong and are appreciated, have opportunities for growth and advancement, flexible work arrangements, and a healthy work-life balance. 

8 Ways To Reduce Turnover and Improve Employee Retention

The goal of reducing turnover and improving retention is to help your staff thrive in their work—not just survive it—and create a workplace culture that makes employees want to stay. Achieving this involves making deliberate choices throughout the hiring and employment experience:

1. Build a Strong Hiring Process 

Reducing turnover begins long before you bring a new team member on board. It starts with a strong hiring process. This means: 

2. Improve Your Onboarding Program

Once you choose your next employee, it’s crucial to have a smooth, thorough onboarding process. Research shows that when new employees have an above-average job transition experience, they are 251% more likely to stay with the organization for two or more years.

This begins with pre-onboarding communication. Don’t stop communicating with your new employee between the time they accept your offer and their first day on the job. This is your opportunity to capture their excitement about starting their new job and build on it. 

Make sure to communicate all the details they’ll need to know before their start date, but also take this opportunity to introduce them to their new coworkers via email and let them know how glad you are they’re joining your team.

Then, once they walk in the door, the onboarding process begins. Onboarding should be much more than filling out employment paperwork—it should help them feel connected to your company, understand expectations as they start their job, and minimize any challenges they may have integrating into their new role.

Learn more about creating a great onboarding program in this blog.

3. Develop a Skilled Management Team

Your management team directly shapes your employees’ experience on the job. They affect how engaged your employees are, whether or not they feel supported in their work, and how likely they’ll be to stay with your company long term.

But simply giving someone the title of “manager” doesn’t mean they will have the leadership and soft skills needed to manage a team well. Make sure you are empowering your managers with the training and resources they need to build trust, foster engagement, communicate effectively, and inspire their teams.

Management training will also help reduce management turnover. ADP found that 29% of new leaders leave a company within a month of receiving their promotion due to a lack of support and training. Training your managers well will help ensure they stay on board to lead your teams to success.

4. Provide Competitive Compensation and Benefits

While pay is not typically the primary cause of turnover, offering competitive compensation and benefits is a crucial component of employee satisfaction. After all, for an employee to thrive at work, they need to first have their basic needs met.

When an employee’s work is fairly compensated with salary, health benefits, and other employee perks, they will be more likely to feel valued and less likely to leave their jobs for greener pastures or health and family reasons.

5. Offer Flexible Work Arrangements

Maintaining work-life balance and having a say in when, how, and where they work are vital components of ensuring employees are happy in their jobs.

Employees who are stressed and overworked are more likely to both miss work for illness and make more mistakes on the job. And as burnt-out employees leave and share their experience with others, a company’s recruitment and retention costs will only go up. It’s important to create an environment where employees can speak freely about their workload and ask for the support they need. 

And, where feasible, offering flexible work hours and/or hybrid or remote work options will help your staff create work schedules that work for them. While not all positions lend themselves to remote work, consider how you can introduce more flexibility into each role.

Giving employees flexibility in when, where, and how they work will help them stay engaged and make them more likely to stay with your company.

6. Create Opportunities for Advancement

The top preventable reason employees left their jobs last year was a lack of career development opportunities. Providing transparent career paths and opportunities for growth is one of the best ways you can ensure your employees see a future for themselves in your company.

The best employees are motivated to pursue growth, job alignment, and a sense of purpose. They want to advance in their careers. And if they can’t do that with you, they’ll move on. In fact, employees who remain in the same role for an extended period of time are more likely to leave their jobs.

Make sure to provide some kind of training program or tuition assistance for your staff so they can improve themselves, move up in their careers, and continue to provide value for your company.

7. Implement Regular Employee Recognition

Employees who feel valued, recognized, and supported are more likely to stay in their jobs longer. That’s why it’s so important to have an effective employee recognition program.

Regular recognition helps foster connection and loyalty and keep employees engaged. But to be effective, employee recognition needs to be consistent, sincere, and organic. For example, consider implementing the following:

  • Watch for signs your employees feel undervalued, such as seeming withdrawn, unenthusiastic, or “checked-out”

  • Invite management and employees to write notes to their colleagues highlighting something they did well and how it impacted the team

  • Present employee recognition publicly, rather than in a 1:1 meeting. Broadcasting an employee’s accomplishments to the whole team not only makes employees feel more valued, it also shows everyone which behaviors you view as valuable

  • Create annual staff awards to honor employees in front of their peers and management

  • Make sure to celebrate and reward behaviors you want to encourage as part of your company culture

8. Gather Employee Feedback

Finally, improving employee retention begins with understanding how employees feel about their jobs and why they leave. Regularly gather employee feedback to gauge how your staff feel about their work, company culture, and management:

  • Cultivate an environment where employees feel safe to share their honest opinions 

  • Implement exit interviews and post-exit interview surveys for all departing staff

  • Conduct stay interviews at regular intervals (for example, 30, 60, and 90 days for new hires and at least annually for tenured employees) to uncover potential issues

  • Schedule monthly or bi-weekly touch points to ensure employee expectations are being met and they’re currently happy in their jobs

  • If possible, use anonymous reporting tools to make staff feel at ease about sharing negative feedback

  • Regularly make improvements based on employee feedback so staff know their ideas will be acted upon

  • Design tailored solutions to address specific challenges, rather than implementing sweeping changes and hoping they’ll help

Routinely asking for feedback from your team gives you the opportunity to course-correct and keep small issues from becoming the reasons why people leave.


We hope these recommendations help you reduce turnover, improve employee retention, and build a stronger, happier, and more productive workforce. If you’d like more recruiting and hiring tips, we invite you to subscribe to our newsletter or check out the rest of the Red Seat blog!