Retention Strategy

Retention strategy: a definition

A retention strategy (استراتيجية الاستبقاء), also called an employee retention strategy, is a structured plan for keeping the employees whom an organisation wants to stay. It does so by addressing the reasons for leaving before a departure takes place, not after the departure has been announced.

Two parts of the definition set its scope. The first is whom the plan is for: the employees the organisation wants to keep, rather than everyone it employs. The second is when the plan acts: on the reasons for leaving, at a stage when no departure has yet occurred, rather than in response to an employee who has already announced that they are going. A retention strategy is therefore a plan made in advance of departures. It is also structured: its sources and its contents are set out in a plan rather than assembled once a resignation arrives.

A retention strategy does not aim to reduce departures to zero

Retention is not the same as bringing the number of employees who leave down to nothing. A departure can be healthy. Two examples are the departure of an employee who does not suit their role, and the departure of an employee who has exhausted what the organisation has to offer them. In the first case the fit between the person and the role is missing; in the second the organisation has nothing further to give the employee. Neither is a departure that the plan sets out to stop.

The aim, then, is not a low figure. It is selective retention: keeping the people who are hard to replace. Under that aim, the question a retention strategy answers is whether those particular employees stay, not how small the total count of departures has become. The people who are hard to replace are those whose departure would leave a gap that the organisation cannot readily fill, and selective retention directs the plan at them.

For that reason the departure rate is examined broken down, not as a single aggregated figure. The departure of a small number of high performers can have a greater effect than the departure of a larger number of employees spread across every level. An aggregated rate cannot show that difference, because it counts every departure in the same way, whatever level the employee was at and however hard they are to replace. Broken down, by level and by the kind of employee leaving, the rate shows whether the departures are falling among the people the organisation wants to keep.

What a retention strategy is built from

A retention strategy is built from the actual reasons employees leave, not from reasons that are assumed. The reasons come from three sources, which differ in what they reveal and in when they reveal it:

• The exit interview. It reveals the reason after the departure has happened. It is held with an employee who is leaving, so what it gives the organisation is an account of a departure that has already been decided.
• The stay survey. It asks the employees who remain, while they are still in post and doing their jobs. Because the employees it asks have not left, the information it gathers arrives at a point when the organisation can still act on it. It is put to the employees the organisation still has, rather than to those it has lost.
• Data. It answers three questions about the departures themselves: which department they come from, at which level, and how many months after joining. The department locates where in the organisation employees are leaving. The level locates the seniority of the employees who leave. The months after joining show how long each of them had been with the organisation when they left.

The last of the three data points, the number of months after joining, determines the direction of the remedy. Departures concentrated in the first six months after the employee joined point to onboarding, or to the expectations that the job offer created, and not to pay. In that case the remedy lies in how new employees are brought into the organisation and in what they were led to expect when they were offered the job, rather than in the wage.

What goes into a retention strategy

The contents of a retention strategy are the areas of the employee’s working life that the plan addresses:

• Pay and total rewards. It covers the wage, and with it the wider set of rewards that the employee receives for their work, of which the wage is one part.
• A path for progression. It is the route by which the employee can advance inside the organisation from the role they hold now.
• The quality of direct management. It concerns the manager to whom the employee reports directly, and how well that manager manages them.
• Workload. It is the amount of work that the employee carries in their role.
• Flexibility. It concerns how far the arrangement of the employee’s work can be adjusted.

The order of priority among these differs from one organisation to another, and from one job level to another within the same organisation. An item that comes first in one organisation, or at one level, can come lower in another. For that reason the data comes before the decision. Which of the contents the plan puts first is settled by what the sources described above show for the organisation and the level in question, not fixed in advance and applied in the same order everywhere.

How a retention strategy differs from employee experience

Employee experience is a description of everything the employee goes through inside the organisation. Retention is a goal, and the experience is put to work in its service.

The two differ in kind as well as in breadth. Employee experience describes; retention aims. Employee experience is the wider of the two, because it covers all of what the employee goes through, and not only what bears on whether they stay. Retention is narrower, and it is the measure by which the success of the experience is judged.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.