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.

You hired the right person. You trained them. You finally stopped doing half their job for them.

Then one ordinary Tuesday, a calendar invite lands titled “quick chat,” and your stomach drops before you’ve even opened it. You already know what it is.

Nobody really warns you about this part: keeping good people is one of the hardest parts of the job, and it’s about so much more than a paycheck. A 2022 survey of over 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%)

Now look closer at those numbers. Better pay edges out work-life balance by only 3%. It beats “doing work I’m good at” by only 6%.

So the move most of us reach for first—just pay them more—isn’t your only lever. Not even close.

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 brutally expensive. On average, companies spend nearly $2,000 onboarding and training every new hire. And when people walk out for good, the damage compounds: by one older estimate, employee turnover costs the U.S. over $11 billion in annual losses, and more recent estimates may run higher.

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: A 2021 survey of over 2,000 employees across 15+ industries found 60% blamed a bad manager for wanting out within the year. Ouch.

• Lack of appreciation: People check out when they don’t feel valued. Over 65% of employees say they’d quit if their hard work and extra effort kept going unnoticed.

• Low pay: The Pew Research Center found over 60% of surveyed workers quit their jobs in 2021 because the money was too low. 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. Quitting because of burnout is especially common among Gen Z and Millennials.

• No flexible work options: When the world shifted online in 2020, people realized they didn’t have to be chained to a desk all day. They’re more willing than ever to quit over a lack of schedule flexibility or no option to work remotely.

• Lack of career advancement opportunities: In a 2021 survey of over 6,000 working American adults, over 60% said the main reason they left was no room to advance. People want to feel like the job they’re in is actually going somewhere.

Read that list back. Notice how few of those causes are truly out of your hands.

How to Retain Good Employees: 12 Science-Backed Tips

Here’s the good news: keeping good people isn’t some 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

Picture a hire who was wrong from day one. Wrong expectations, a thin first week, no one assigned to help them find the bathroom, let alone the strategy. Three months later they’re gone, and everyone calls it a “bad fit.”

Dig into why someone quit and you’ll often find that exact story underneath.

Strong employee onboarding can lift retention and boost productivity by over 70%. So the best investment you can make in retention starts before the person even shows up. It’s a solid onboarding process.

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. They’re not. 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

There’s a difference between someone who shows up and someone who’s all in. The second one stays.

Engagement and retention move together. People want to feel like their work matters, like there’s a real thread connecting them to the mission. Something that makes them care, that gives them skin in the game.

Here’s what Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2022 Report found:

• Highly engaged teams are more productive.
• Units with low engagement have higher turnover rates.
• Employee stress is at an all-time high (leading to less attention).
• Investing in employee wellness can improve concentration.

Action Step: Try these 20 Awesome (& Fun) Ways to Motivate Employees, like promoting workplace friendships with communal lunch tables or regularly surveying employees for ways you can improve the place. 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

No shock here: recognition keeps people around.

A 2022–2024 Gallup and Workhuman study that tracked 3,447 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.

But here’s the catch: not everyone feels appreciated the same way. 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:

Think about it from the other side. Who wants to grind away 40 hours a week for a boss who never once notices the extra mile? Appreciation is the fuel that keeps morale running. Let the tank hit empty and people check out, then check job listings.

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.

A 2018 survey found nearly 70% of employees would be motivated to stay at their current job if they got more rewards and recognition.

Nearly seven in ten. That’s not a rounding error.

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)

A staggering 80% of employees report feeling stressed at work because of poor communication.

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.

Give your team learning opportunities and engagement goes up. So do the odds they’ll stick around. The flip side is just as true: people who can’t see a path forward stop picturing a future with you at all.

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

And it feeds on itself, in the best way. You invest in your people to show you care where their careers are headed. They get to learn, grow, and reach for bigger roles. And they feel loyal to the place that bet on them. Loyalty in, loyalty out.

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 development perks you can offer, and here’s why:

• 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.

Here’s the part people miss: it boosts 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 5 Coaching Techniques to Turn Your Employees Into All-Stars.

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 shows up in the details: free yoga and fitness classes, professional development coaching, healthy snacks in the breakroom. That mindful, yoga-flavored vibe carries straight into who they hire and keep. They pull in 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. Gen Z and Millennials seem especially likely to quit because of burnout.

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 11 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. Older estimates touted returns as high as six-to-one from fewer sick days and higher productivity, but the evidence is genuinely mixed. A large 2019 randomized trial, the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, found no significant effect on medical spending or productivity in its first two years.

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

Here’s a number most managers underestimate.

Over 90% of U.S. workers want feedback more often than once a year.

Once a year. That’s the bar a lot of people 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

Research found that 60% of employees say flexibility would make them feel more empowered. But there’s a deeper layer, and Harvard Business Review nails it: what people really want isn’t flexibility.

It’s autonomy.

Nobody wants their boss playing “mom” over 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, loud and clear: I trust you. No hovering. No looking over the shoulder. You 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-sight, 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

So let’s land the plane.

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:

• Streamline hiring and onboarding: Set every new hire off to a good start by streamlining your training processes to set a positive tone for their full employment.
• Improving employee engagement: Make sure people get to focus on their “zone of genius.” Assign them projects they are legitimately interested in.
• Practice respectful, direct communication: Nobody wants to have a disrespectful talk.
• Prioritize communication: Communication training for all levels of management is crucial to ensure that people don’t leave the organization due to mistreatment.
• 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. After all, healthy workers tend to be happier and less stressed. Happier workers are more productive and less likely to quit.

Maybe the old saying is right: people don’t quit their job, they quit their boss. So 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.