What is employee retention?

For a company to succeed, employers need to keep their best employees on board. This is the goal of employee retention: an organization’s concerted efforts to retain their existing staff.

Employee retention is often expressed as a statistic; the percentage of employees that remain in a company for a fixed time period (e.g. a quarter). 

Employee retention strategies are practices an organization follows to retain its staff (e.g. through compensation, policies, benefits, office perks, etc.). A company’s main intent when planning those strategies is to minimize employee turnover, in other words, the number of employees that leave a company during a certain period.