Employee retention: Which actions help?

Here, employee retention describes the desire and willingness to continue working in the company and contribute. Length of service alone does not capture this. One person may stay a long time because reliable working conditions matter to them. Another may stay temporarily despite having already disengaged from the work. The two situations call for different action.

Distinguish between three observations: How do people experience their daily work? Which conditions make the company attractive to them? And how are actual arrivals and departures developing? None of these perspectives fully explains the others. A survey complements the operational view; it replaces neither workforce planning nor a voluntary personal conversation.

Satisfaction and retention are not identical either. Someone can be satisfied with their colleagues and still leave because a development opportunity is missing. The article on employee satisfaction helps keep these different questions separate when choosing actions.

An action needs an understandable connection to the problem. If the team is frustrated by constantly changing priorities, a new health benefit is unlikely to resolve that uncertainty. It may still be useful. It simply answers a different question. Before every investment, check which observable change you want to achieve.

Start with a specific work situation: handovers repeatedly cause follow-up questions, decisions remain unresolved or new tasks displace agreed work. Describe the situation without diagnosing individuals. ‘The handover often does not include clear responsibility’ is more useful for improvement than ‘Our team is not engaged enough’.

Add existing evidence from voluntary feedback, exit interviews and how your work is organised. Consider contradictory observations too. People who stay may experience everyday work differently from those who have already left. A single comment or departure should therefore not provide an explanation for the whole company.

People searching for the ‘6 pillars of employee retention’ usually need a clear framework. For your practical work, we suggest the following six areas. They are a guide for decisions, not a scientific test or a ranking that applies to every company.

Not every issue can be decided by the team leader alone. A structural pay problem, for example, belongs at the level with authority over it. Record who must make a decision and by when a response is possible. A missing decision should not be hidden behind further surveys.

First choose a problem that is relevant, specific and within your influence. Check four questions: What consequences does it have for the work? How reliable is the evidence? Can we actually change something? And how would employees recognise the improvement? An issue attracting many complaints is not automatically the issue with the greatest available scope for action.

Then define a small step you can review. ‘We are strengthening retention’ remains too general. ‘From the next planning session, every handover will have clear responsibility’ describes a practice you can change. Record the goal, responsible person, affected team and review date. A paragraph or a table row is enough to begin with.

Avoid starting simultaneous actions without clear attribution. If you change task allocation, working hours and management processes at once, later feedback becomes harder to understand. Independent necessary improvements can, of course, run in parallel. In that case, state that their individual contributions can hardly be assessed separately.

Fictional example: Employees in a service team complain that they can never plan their work reliably. The manager initially considers an additional team outing. But feedback reveals a different pattern: last-minute promises to customers regularly displace tasks already agreed. The team feels it has too little control over its own week.

The manager therefore introduces a shared priority list and defines who may review new commitments. An assignment is only added once it has been decided which other work will be done later as a result. The action consists of a clear decision rule; an additional meeting without that rule would not yet be a solution.

At the agreed review, the team considers whether the rule was actually applied and whether work feels more predictable. The manager also checks whether unplanned reprioritisation is decreasing. This allows the decision to be developed further. The short experiment does not yet allow conclusions about whether people will stay over the long term.

Separate implementation, perception and operational developments. Implementation means the agreed rule is applied. Perception means the team experiences everyday work differently. An operational development might be less rework, for example. These observations belong together but should not be mixed into a single success metric.

For this example, a recurring statement such as ‘I was able to plan my tasks reliably this week’ is suitable. Use a consistent scale from 1 ‘does not apply at all’ to 5 ‘fully applies’ and allow people to skip a question that does not fit. The statement is an original working aid, not a validated employee retention scale.

Consider several comparable points in time, participation and the distribution of responses. An average can hide opposing experiences. Changes in the team, leave or an unusual volume of work can also play a role. The article Measuring employee satisfaction offers guidance on interpretation.

A more favourable trend is a reason to investigate, not proof of the cause on its own. Ask during the review: What was actually done differently? What other changes were there? What supports our explanation, and what argues against it? On this basis, you can continue, adjust or end the action.

Before the start, explain what the feedback will be used for and which decisions are possible. Asking about improvements creates expectations. If an issue is outside your influence, say so and describe the next realistic step. A reasoned limit is more useful than a non-binding commitment.

Do not use team feedback to look for individuals you suspect might want to leave. Open comments can make people identifiable even without names. Limit yourselves to necessary information and clarify access and analysis in advance. The pages on confidentiality and co-determination provide guidance.

Close every round visibly: this is what we understood, this is what we will change, someone is responsible and this is when we will check again. This creates a reviewable work process even when no improvement is visible yet. A survey with no visible response, by contrast, mainly generates more data.

Through short, regular team check-ins, EngageBeat helps you observe mood and motivation over time. This allows you to make more focused decisions about where to start and repeatedly gather feedback on changes. Custom questions in EngageBeat Fokus let you connect feedback to a specific initiative. You plan and take responsibility for the actions themselves in your everyday work.

Explore employee surveys with EngageBeat or take a look at the public product demo. A team check-in is neither an individual performance appraisal nor a guarantee of lower turnover. It provides an additional basis for shaping the conditions for good work more specifically.