How to Improve Employee Retention: 13 Creative Ways to Retain Them

One of the biggest pain points for companies is improving employee retention. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Between July and November 2022 alone, more than 4 million Americans left jobs voluntarily. 

To corroborate this study, Gartner has revealed that the business sector could see a turnover rate as high as 24% in the years to come, imploring organizations to place better employee retention strategies.

Employees are considered the biggest asset for an organization, and the second is customers. If you carefully deal with your employees, they will reflect this feeling to your clients and customers, making you stand apart from the rest of the market. The key to this is employee engagement. 

A Gallup study has shown that organizations with highly engaged employees can notice 21% higher profitability, calling for implementing tested employee retention strategies. Take big brands like Facebook, Amazon, TATA, and Google as an example. These organizations are a few to name who have one thing in common: they hire talent and keep them.

In today's competitive world, highly skilled workers may feel compelled to hop to another job if they get a better offer. An employee who doesn't feel engaged & respected or is not progressing in your business will start looking for other better options.

So, you wish to reduce staff turnover and improve productivity. In that case, creating an effective employee retention strategy should be a high priority on your to-do list.

What is employee retention?

Employee retention encompasses the overall efforts of an organization to keep its staff members from leaving. From a much broader perspective, it’s about building an environment where employees experience the three foundational Rs of employee retention: respect, reward, and recognition.

Employee retention programs can vary, depending on what the company lacks. Here are some examples: 

• Implementation of peer-to-peer support groups or free counseling
• Integration of AI technology like AI image generators, AI slideshow makers, or copywriting software to automate tasks and make jobs easier
• Flexible and remote work setups
• Reverse mentoring, where employees give feedback to their superiors

Build these programs with the foundational values of employee retention, and enjoy the main benefit of better employee experience—recruiting top talent that sticks around.

Meanwhile, there’s a Gallagher report predicting the state of employee retention in 2024. It says that 57% of organizations expect an increase in workforce headcount. Employee retention remains a top operational priority, highlighting the need for companies to extend their efforts to prevent employees from leaving.

Employee retention challenges

Retaining employees goes beyond just offering a paycheck. Businesses must address key challenges that impact job satisfaction, engagement, and long-term commitment. By identifying these obstacles and implementing creative ways to retain employees, companies can build a workplace where employees feel valued, motivated, and eager to stay.

1. Lack of career growth opportunities 

Employees often leave when they feel stuck in the same role without a clear path for advancement. Companies that fail to provide training, mentorship, or promotions risk losing top talent to competitors. Professional development programs and skill-building workshops are creative ways to retain and keep employees engaged.

2. Inadequate compensation & benefits 

Competitive salaries and benefits are essential for employee retention. If employees feel underpaid or their benefits do not meet industry standards, they are more likely to explore other job opportunities. Providing performance-based bonuses, wellness programs, and personalized perks can be creative ways to retain employees while improving job satisfaction.

3. Poor work-life balance 

Employees who struggle to maintain a balance between work and personal life often experience burnout. Rigid schedules, excessive workloads, and unrealistic expectations lead to dissatisfaction and increased turnover. Introducing flexible work arrangements, remote work options, and additional paid leave can be creative ways to retain employees and enhance their overall well-being.

4. Lack of recognition & incentives 

Employees need to feel valued and appreciated for their contributions. When organizations fail to recognize efforts or reward achievements, motivation and loyalty decline. Implementing incentive programs, employee recognition platforms, and non-monetary rewards are creative ways to retain employees and foster a culture of appreciation.

5. Weak company culture & engagement 

A toxic work environment, poor leadership, and lack of team collaboration can drive employees away. Employees who do not feel a sense of belonging are less likely to stay committed to the company. Encouraging open communication, promoting inclusivity, and organizing team-building activities are creative ways to retain employees and strengthen workplace culture.

How to calculate employee retention rate?

HR should have specific measures to track employee retention rate statistics when discussing employee retention strategies. When you trace such statistics, you will know what actionable initiatives could be used to curb employee retention rates.

Calculating employee retention rate is simple: Divide the total number of employees who left during a period by the total number of employees at the end of a period to get the percentage.

Research by the Center for American Progress states that the cost of replacing highly trained employees/executives can easily exceed double their annual salary. Every company's goal is to hire talented staff and get them to stay around longer.

Employee retention is not an easy job. A recent study by Willis Towers Watson states that more than half of the firms globally report difficulty retaining some of their most valued staff members.

Retain Your Best Talent with Meaningful Recognition

Employee retention starts with appreciation. Use Empuls to create a culture of continuous recognition, rewards, and engagement that keeps employees motivated and committed.

Boost Retention with Empuls

How to improve employee retention: 13 Most effective strategies

Here are a few tips on how you can improve employee retention. Some of these tips may be known to you while others may be new to you, but the bottom line is that all these tips will help you stimulate long-term loyalty from your top performers.

1. Analyze why employees leave

If you don’t know why employees are leaving your company, you won’t develop an effective strategy to get them to stay.

First, review the average turnover rate for your industry - is your employee turnover rate higher than average?

Implementing an exit interview process for departing employees can give you insight into the real reasons employees are leaving.

After all, they’re more apt to be honest when they’re leaving, and if you don’t ask them yourself, they might tell the world in a negative review on Glassdoor or another site.

Look at the patterns you see once you’ve started to gather your data. Are you getting feedback from multiple employees on work/life balance issues, manager problems, workplace culture issues, stalled career development, or something else?

What is getting in the way of your employee retention strategy? You can’t fix a problem until you can identify it.

2. Look into your hiring strategy

It all starts with hiring. The people who leave you are the people you once hired. So take a deeper look at your hiring process, including the job requirement, job description, interview processes, compensation and benefits, the roles and responsibilities.

And are you seeing a large number of employees quit a few months after they’re hired because the job wasn’t what they thought it would be?

Your job descriptions should be an honest look at your corporate culture and a detailed and accurate view of the job responsibilities.

Employees shouldn’t be surprised by the basic aspects of the job after they start - that means you need to adjust something in the hiring process, so you’re hiring the right people from the start and setting up the right expectations.

3. Optimize employee onboarding

The first day at a new workplace is often very similar to the experience we used to have on the first day at school – the jitters, the excitement of meeting new people, learning new things, and so on.

While it's challenging for the new employees to familiarize themselves with the new environment, people, process, job responsibilities, etc., it’s just as challenging for the managers.

It becomes the responsibility of the manager to set the new hire up for success by making them feel comfortable with the organization and the team from the beginning (well before their first day on the job!).

An intelligent, well-thought-through, individual plan for each employee onboarded can go a long way. Ensure the employees are not just spoken about the roles & responsibilities but are also educated about the company culture and how they can thrive each day.

Layout plans and goals for the first week, first month, first quarter, and so on, so they are clear about what is expected.

Gestures like making an announcement on the intranet portal, introducing the new employees, pairing them up with a buddy or a mentor to help them sail through the first few days can greatly impact.

In short, the employee onboarding experience should be just as planned and thought after as a customer onboarding experience.

4. Invest in employee development

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.” - Benjamin Franklin

One of the simplest ways to reduce employee turnover is by providing good career advancement opportunities. The top reason employees leave a company is because they don’t see a fulfilling long-term career ahead of them.

If you’re not providing regular career development opportunities and a fair promotion system, employees will get frustrated and start looking elsewhere for jobs.

This doesn’t mean you need to promote every employee every year- that’s not reasonable, and your workers know that.

But they do want to know what their career path could look like, have regular discussions about career progression with their managers, and know that the opportunities for promotions are clearly stated and fairly distributed.

Losing people because of insufficient learning opportunities is probably one of the worst ways of losing your talent. These are the curious people – curious to learn new technologies, techniques, processes, etc. - and curious people often make great employees.

These employees jump into any new challenges and think of creative solutions.

Encouraging employees to constantly learn and equip themselves with the latest trends and technologies in the market will keep them from leaving.

5. Select the right managers & coach these managers

We’ve all heard the familiar phrase “Employees leave managers, not companies”. Managers make a huge impact on employees and teams.

They directly affect how engaged and motivated employees are – and therefore, how long they are likely to continue working in an organization. But, what is it that employees do not like seeing in their managers?

From playing favorites to making inappropriate advances, not communicating sufficiently, micromanagement, not appreciating enough, not listening to the team enough, not being decisive, not providing enough learning opportunities, etc., can be extremely demotivating and push employees towards quitting the organization.

One of the best ways to avoid this, and encourage a good manager-reportee relationship is to equip the managers with the right kind of enablement training, learning material, etc.

Providing managers sufficient free-handed funds to reward team members and bond with the team over lunches/dinners will also help break the ice. Using tech platforms for effective one-on-one feedback and using social intranet platforms to connect and collaborate with the team can also go a long way in building great performing teams.

Selecting your managers carefully, and training them on management skills thoroughly, helps your supervisors succeed and your employees stay satisfied.

6. Encourage workplace socialization

When I speak with people who love their jobs and have vital friendships at work, they always talk about how their workgroup is like a family. - Tom Rath

We tend to spend a larger chunk of our time at the workplace/working than with our families. So, don’t you think encouraging employees to build strong workplace friendships helps the purpose of building strong, connected, and happy organizations?

Workplace friendships make coming to work less obligatory and more fun and something to look forward to.

7. Establish trust through transparent communication

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. - George Bernard Shaw

Great communication is just like a good game of tennis – it consists of great volleys.

Communication is not like what it used to be decades ago, where the management would send out memos or stick announcements on notice boards without any means for employees to share their views and opinions.

In today’s fast-paced world, employees expect to stay up to date with every company's development and want to voice their thoughts and opinions about it.

The most innovative and successful organizations aren’t waiting to see disengaged employees with low productivity. Still, they invest in a technology platform that can connect employees – no matter where they are working from, which part of the world, or what device they are connected from.

A digital communication and collaboration platform like an intranet lets you explore creative ways of establishing communication, quick messages from senior leadership, brief conversations between managers and team members, HR announcements, or opinion polls.

These platforms help leaders stay connected to all employees and give employees ample opportunities to share their views, ideas, questions, and concerns. This sends out a strong message that the employee's voice is vital for the organization’s success - thus increasing engagement and retention.

8. Show gratitude and recognition

Recognize and affirm people when they contribute to the mission you share. Do this and you will ignite their purpose and potential. - Mike Byam

One simple thing that greatly reduces employee turnover is recognizing and thanking employees for their hard work.

Strategies to reduce employee turnover don’t always have to be costly and extensive - they can be as simple as noticing when someone has done an excellent job and telling them why you appreciate their dedication and hard work.

You can do this by implementing a formal recognition program. But it’s critical not to ignore the small gestures as well. Employees who don’t feel adequately recognized are twice as likely to quit in the next year - significantly impacting your turnover rates.

And 65% of employees say they haven’t received any form of recognition for good work in the last year, so there’s a lot of room for improvement at almost every organization.

No one dislikes being told how good a job they have done. Appreciation is something everyone appreciates!

That is why rewards and recognitions greatly impact how motivated and engaged employees are, affecting how long they will work with the company. They create a perception amongst employees that the organization values and respects their work.

Not just that, it helps employees find focus and purpose in their day-to-day activities. So much is the effect of rewards and recognition. Research by Bersin & Associates showed that companies with highly effective recognition programs that improve employee engagement have 31% lower voluntary turnover.

Make it a habit to thank your teammates when they go the extra mile, be it a simple “thank you”, or “kudos” at the weekly meeting, an award at the annual gala or a gift voucher to show your appreciation.

Recognition is the most powerful when it is made “social.” Be it a recognition like an employee of the month or any team recognition, birthdays, or work anniversaries, announcements on social intranet platforms bring the organization together in celebration and lift employees' morale.

Also, having a structured rewards and recognition program helps an organization align with and reinforce its values and beliefs. Who in the organization gets rewarded and recognized and why - represents an unequivocal statement of the organization's true values and culture.

A significant number of successful organizations also invest in and appreciate the ideas and innovations of their employees. Investing in a formal platform can also help send out wishes to employees on their special milestones, birthdays, work anniversaries, etc.

9. Seek employee feedback & act on it

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” – Ken Blanchard

It becomes challenging to retain employees when you have no clue or are too late in realizing what challenges employees face, how they feel about the work environment, whether they need any specific support, etc.

The outdated yearly or half-yearly feedback works no longer to help the cause - especially with today's generation, where not only are they keen on voicing their opinions instantly, but they also expect quick actions and turnarounds on the feedback shared.

This is where conducting regular (weekly/monthly) one-on-one feedback sessions and surveys come to the rescue. Employee feedback can prove a potent tool to boost engagement and morale.

Employees feel empowered when encouraged to share their ideas, thoughts, and views about the various happenings within the team or organization.

Conducting surveys from time to time to understand the organization's pulse or to collect opinions of specific areas of operation can be highly beneficial.

Lifecycle surveys can also help measure the ‘Moments that Matter’ across stages like - onboarding, role change, celebrating a work anniversary, etc. Capturing and analyzing employee experiences can help understand the challenges sooner and thus take faster action.

While collecting feedback solves one part of the problem, it doesn’t make a huge difference until you take action on the feedback received.

Taking timely action and communicating back to employees on what action is being brought about the concerns and shared feedback makes a difference.

10. Value employee health and wellbeing

"Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity." - John F. Kennedy

With organizations across the globe increasingly emphasizing the health and well-being of employees, very few workers are willing to tolerate long working hours and unhealthy work conditions.

Moreover, research shows that stressed, overwhelmed, and overworked employees are likely to fall ill more frequently. Over time, overloading employees with too much work can lead to productivity loss, low morale, and a higher turnover rate.

Recognizing the vital role employee health and wellbeing plays - physical, emotional, mental, or financial - in engaging employees and cultivating a strong workplace culture can go a long way in reducing turnover.

Be it as simple as encouraging employees to take paid-offs and breaks once in a while to unwind and relax, adding headcount wherever necessary, helping them with expert advice on making sound financial decisions, conducting regular counseling sessions to ensure sound mental health, conducting yoga and meditation classes or sponsoring their gym costs – employees value the organizations that encourage their wellbeing.

Employees often leave companies because they feel burned out - their hours are too long, their vacation time is too short and sparse, and they don’t have time to be complete human beings and productive workers.

If departing employees tell you in exit interviews that this is the reason they’re leaving, look closely at your policies.

11. Conduct exit interviews

According to Robert Half, 83% of organizations fail to do exit interviews. However friendly and open the organization is, employees are bound to leave and hop to another organization. 

You need to make sure that you conduct exit interviews before the employees leave. Exit interviews are the last opportunity to understand what went wrong and why you are losing the employee.

Exit interview could involve a few questions like:

• What do you like the most and least about your job?
• Was there anything that made it challenging for you to perform your duties as per the expectations?
• What suggestions could you offer for improvement for any problems you faced at your workplace?
• Is there anything that the organization could have done but so far hasn't do it?

12. Keep up with compensation

This seems essential, but too many employers discount the importance of maintaining adequate employee compensation and benefits.

Suppose you’re not regularly ensuring that your total compensation and benefits are competitive with other companies in your industry. In that case, you incentivize your employees to look elsewhere for work.

After all, employees are working because they need to support themselves, and that’s what a fair wage and competitive benefits allow them to do. Replacing an employee is expensive - raising salaries or adding a few benefits could help your bottom line if it reduces turnover.

13. Let go when needed

One poor performer can drag down a whole team and drive away your top employees.

One toxic employee - who doesn’t perform to standards, makes others uncomfortable or causes issues regularly - can have a significant effect on your wider working environment.

Not every employee you hire will be a strong fit for the long term, and that’s ok. You should check why it ended up in the wrong hire to avoid repeating the mistake.

But it would help if you took action sooner rather than later to adjust so that you don’t lose the employees who do fit and contribute.

Checklist for tracking employee retention

Below is the checklist you can use while planning an employee retention strategy for your organization.

• Gauge your employee retention rate.
• Make use of established and verified retention strategies, and avoid guesswork. Go with data and insights before taking action.
• Avoid the false assumption that your employees are happy instead; regularly get feedback from your employees. Understand the why before concluding the what and how.
• Conduct exit interviews to understand what went wrong and recognize areas needing improvement.‍

Strengthening employee retention with Empuls

Retaining top talent is not just about salaries or promotions. It is about building an environment where employees feel valued, connected, and motivated to stay. A strong employee retention strategy focuses on ongoing engagement, meaningful recognition, and creating a workplace culture that employees do not want to leave.

This is where Empuls plays a crucial role. Combining recognition, rewards, feedback, and engagement into one platform, Empuls helps businesses foster a sense of belonging and commitment among employees.

How Empuls helps improve employee retention

✅ Recognition that matters: Celebrate employee contributions through peer-to-peer recognition and real-time appreciation, reinforcing a culture of gratitude.

✅ Personalized rewards and incentives: Offer flexible rewards that align with employee preferences, making recognition more impactful and meaningful.

✅ Actionable employee feedback: Leverage surveys and sentiment analysis to gather insights, address concerns, and enhance employee satisfaction.

✅ Stronger workplace connections: Build a sense of belonging with digital engagement features that encourage collaboration and team bonding.

✅ Continuous engagement and motivation: Keep employees inspired with regular recognition, milestone celebrations, and performance-based incentives.

Retention is not just about reducing turnover. It is about keeping employees engaged, happy, and committed to your organization’s success. Empuls helps businesses create a culture where employees feel valued and motivated to stay for the long run.

Conclusion

Follow the golden thumb rule. Place yourself in your employee's shoes and try and see where things are going wrong. When you try to improve your workplace by making necessary changes, your employees will note it. This is what will drive your business to achieve great success.

Employee retention is an ongoing challenge all organizations face, irrespective of their size. Use the above-featured list of ways to reduce employee retention as a primary point to frame your employee retention strategies. Once you prepare them, try them out and see the difference in employee retention rates.

All you need to do is identify which points you need to include, frame those points as strategies, try them out if it's successful bingo you have gotten there, and if not, identify and make the necessary changes as and when required.