Different approaches for Employee retention

April 09, 2025

Abstract

In many organizations, operations are ever-evolving where innovations and disruptions by new technologies, tools and approaches are frequent. Due to this nature, recruiting and retaining of resources is a challenging factor. This article explores a suitable approach for companies to sustain their workforce using different approaches.

Keywords – Employee retention, Workforce, Empowerment, Organizational commitment, Sustainability

Introduction

Industries face numerous challenges and disruptions due to various reasons, and in order to match the evolvement, companies require to retain a skilled workforce capable adapting to this evolving nature, and this article explores approaches to retain the skilled workforce.

The importance and advantages of employee retention

Employee retention refers to the process of retaining the skilled workforce that drives the organization, in order to prevent disruption due to skilled employees leaving organization. It has been a critical topic in the studies of Human resource management. According to Article [2], key factors affecting employee retention include:

-          Working culture in the organization

-          Job satisfaction

-          Leadership approaches

-          Career development opportunities

-          Organizational support

The book “The Role of Talent Management in Enhancing Employee Retention: Mediating the Influence of Psychological Empowerment” [2] mentions the direct connection of employee retention to the stability and performance of an organization. Results of high turnover may reflect in the form of direct costs, as well as indirect costs to the organization [1], as elaborated below:

-          Direct costs – incurred due to the need to recruit and train new staff

-          Indirect costs – incurred due to the customer dissatisfaction resulting in with deployment of new and / or inexperienced staff

It is inevitable to mention that by retaining the workforce, companies can prevent or avoid above direct or indirect costs that may incur due to employee turnover.

Approaches for employee retention

This section of the article explores different approaches for retaining employees in an organization. Main approaches include

1.     Employee empowerment

Providing employees with the authority and power to better perform in their work results in the focus on the self-efficiency on the work by employee, and ultimately leads to job satisfaction [1].

2.     Organizational Commitment

Prior researchers [1] describe organizational commitment in different ways, where some research explain it as the strength of an employee towards the involvement to the organization, and in certain researches it is explained in multiple factors, as explained below:

-          Want to stay (Affective), which conveys the employee’s emotional attachment to the organization

-          Need to stay (Continuance), which conveys that the employee’s perception is to stay, work and win a situation, through which he expects the company to pay-off the effort

-          Ought to stay (Normative), indicates employee’s perception on his duty towards the organization. This perception can be positively established by empowering employees and assigning responsibilities.

 

3.     Providing Incentives / increments based on performance

Through incentives and better perks based on the employee performance, it can be emphasised to them that the work they accomplish are valued. In that way, when the employee is ready to contribute above his level, he is aware that contributing with high efforts result in high pay off by the company. This way, employees would have less requirement to leave the company.

4.     Organizational support

Employees who receiving support from the organization feel they are valued by the organization, which creates sense of connection towards the organization, which promotes employee to stay and contribute to the organization.

Challenges in implementing the approaches

1.     Differences between people within the organization – Due to high diversity of people in the aspects including but not limited to age, gender, nationality, culture and values, applying a general approach for employee retention could be challenging [3]

2.     Economic and political environment of the country of the organization could also be a challenging factor. Economic crisis, tariffs and other regulatory, non-regulatory challenges to the organization’s sector may directly result in low employee retention [3]

 

REFERENCES

1.     Murray, W.C.; Holmes, M.R. Impacts of Employee Empowerment and Organizational Commitment on Workforce Sustainability. Sustainability 2021, 13, 3163. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13063163

 

2.     Menezes, D.B.S.; Gumashivili, M.; Kanokon, K. The Role of Talent Management in Enhancing Employee Retention: Mediating the Influence of Psychological Empowerment. Sustainability 2025, 17, 3277. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17073277

 

3.     Rattanapon, K.; Jorissen, A.; Jones, K.P.; Ketkaew, C. An Analysis of Multigenerational Issues of Generation X and Y Employees in Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Thailand: The Moderation Effect of Age Groups on Person–Environment Fit and Turnover Intention. Behav. Sci. 2023, 13, 489. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs13060489