Employee Retention Strategies: What Current Evidence Says Employees Value
August 2, 2026 · Human Resources · 9 min read
Employee retention is often discussed as if there were one dominant reason people leave and one intervention that will keep them. Current evidence points in the opposite direction: employees leave for a mix of pay, wellbeing, career, job-fit, management, workload and personal reasons, and the relative importance of those factors changes by workforce and labour market.
A useful retention strategy therefore does not start with a universal turnover-cost estimate or a generic list of perks. It starts by identifying why valued employees in the organisation are leaving, which groups are most at risk, and which parts of the employee experience the organisation can realistically improve.
This 2026 guide uses current Gallup and LinkedIn evidence to separate measurable retention drivers from common oversimplifications.
What current evidence says about why employees leave
Gallup’s Employee Retention & Attraction indicator tracks reasons U.S. employees give for leaving jobs. In 2024, pay and benefits were the most common single reason, but they accounted for 16% of departures. Direct supervisor, manager or senior leadership accounted for 9%, and advancement, development or career opportunities also accounted for 9%.
Gallup’s broader grouping is more revealing. Engagement and culture reasons accounted for 37% of departures, while wellbeing and work-life-balance reasons accounted for 31%. Combined, those two categories represented 68% of reasons in the 2024 U.S. data.
This does not mean those percentages should be applied to every country or organisation. They come from Gallup’s U.S. employee research. They do show why statements such as “people leave managers, not companies” or “compensation is rarely the real reason” are too simplistic.
Source: Gallup, Employee Retention & Attraction
What employees look for in a different job
Gallup’s 2025 U.S. research on job attraction found that the most frequently rated “very important” attribute was greater work-life balance and personal wellbeing, at 60%. Greater stability and job security followed at 57%, and a significant increase in income or benefits at 53%.
Other factors included being able to do what the employee does best, moving away from a bad manager or leader, and accelerating professional or career development.
The important lesson is that retention and attraction are multi-factor problems. An employer can improve manager quality and still lose employees because pay is uncompetitive or work has become unsustainable. It can increase pay and still lose people who cannot see a future inside the organisation.
Source: Gallup, The Top Four Reasons for Taking a New Job, 2025
Manager quality still matters greatly
Rejecting the slogan “people leave managers” does not mean managers are unimportant. Gallup’s current engagement research says managers account for 70% of the variance in team-level engagement.
Gallup also reported in a 2024 study that 42% of employees who voluntarily left their organisation in the previous year said their manager or organisation could have done something to prevent the departure. That figure is about perceived preventability, not proof that the manager caused 42% of turnover.
The practical implication is that managers should be part of a retention strategy, especially around expectation setting, workload, recognition, development conversations, feedback and day-to-day relationships.
Source: Gallup, Manager Development
Source: Gallup, Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored
Career development is part of retention, but not a guarantee
LinkedIn Learning’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report surveyed 937 L&D and HR professionals with influence over learning budgets and 679 learners. It found that 88% of organisations were concerned about employee retention, and respondents ranked providing learning opportunities as their number-one retention strategy.
The same report found that 84% of employees agreed that learning adds purpose to their work. These results support investment in development and career opportunity, but they should not be turned into a fixed claim that training reduces turnover by a particular percentage.
Source: LinkedIn Learning, 2025 Workplace Learning Report
Eight evidence-aware retention strategies
1. Keep pay and benefits credible
Compensation is not the only retention factor, but current Gallup data does not support dismissing it. Pay and benefits were the most common single reason U.S. employees reported leaving in 2024, and better pay or benefits remained one of the most important attributes employees looked for in another job in 2025.
Organisations should compare key roles with the relevant labour market, explain how pay progresses, and address obvious internal inequities. A retention programme cannot compensate indefinitely for pay that employees perceive as unfair or materially below their alternatives.
2. Make workload and wellbeing operational issues
Work-life balance and personal wellbeing were the highest-rated attributes in Gallup’s 2025 U.S. attraction research. That does not mean adding wellness perks. Organisations should examine workload, staffing, schedules, recovery time, role clarity and the degree to which employees can sustain the way work is organised.
3. Develop managers around specific retention-related behaviours
Train and support managers to set expectations, recognise good work, give useful feedback, manage workload, hold career conversations and respond to concerns before they become resignation decisions.
Measure whether these behaviours actually improve rather than treating course attendance as the outcome.
4. Create visible development and mobility paths
Employees do not all need a traditional upward promotion. Development can include lateral moves, project leadership, specialist pathways, mentoring, stretch assignments and access to new skills.
The important feature is visibility: employees should understand what opportunities exist, what capabilities are required and how they can prepare for them.
5. Improve job fit and role clarity
Gallup’s retention data includes job fit, unrealistic expectations and the work itself among reasons people leave. This means retention starts before a resignation risk appears.
Recruit accurately, set realistic expectations, clarify responsibilities and revisit role design when work has changed significantly from what the employee was hired to do.
6. Listen before the exit interview
Exit interviews can identify patterns, but the organisation has already lost the employee. Retention systems should also gather information while employees are still present.
Stay interviews, manager conversations, pulse surveys and structured career discussions can surface issues around workload, growth, pay, role fit and team dynamics while action is still possible.
A stay interview should not promise that every request will be granted. Its value is in understanding what matters to the employee and identifying risks that might otherwise remain invisible.
7. Offer flexibility where the work permits it
Flexibility is one factor among many, and not every role can be remote or highly flexible. Where work can be performed in different ways, employers should make deliberate decisions about location, scheduling and autonomy rather than assuming one arrangement suits every workforce.
The retention question is not “remote or office?” in the abstract. It is whether the arrangement supports performance while remaining competitive for the people the organisation needs.
8. Segment retention data instead of relying on one company-wide rate
A single turnover percentage can hide the real problem. Analyse voluntary turnover by role, department, location, manager, tenure band and other legitimate workforce segments.
A 12% company-wide turnover rate can look acceptable while a critical technical team loses a third of its experienced staff. Retention investment should follow the concentration of business risk rather than the organisation-wide average alone.
How to measure retention properly
Voluntary turnover
Track employees who chose to leave separately from involuntary departures. Use a consistent calculation period so trends can be compared.
Regrettable turnover
Identify departures the organisation genuinely wanted to prevent. This helps distinguish the loss of high-value or difficult-to-replace capability from normal workforce movement.
New-hire turnover
Track departures during the first months or first year separately. High early attrition can point to recruitment, expectation-setting, onboarding, manager or job-design problems.
Turnover by manager and team
Manager-level patterns can be highly informative, but they need context. A team undergoing restructuring or seasonal change should not be compared blindly with a stable office function.
Internal mobility
Track moves between roles, functions and locations. Strong internal mobility can indicate that employees are finding new opportunities without having to leave the organisation.
Employee sentiment and engagement
Use engagement, role-clarity, recognition, development and wellbeing measures as leading indicators, but do not assume a survey score alone predicts an individual’s resignation.
Exit and stay themes
Code recurring themes so patterns can be quantified over time. Avoid forcing every departure into a single category if several factors contributed.
Do not use a universal cost-of-turnover figure
Turnover costs vary dramatically by role. Recruitment expense, vacancy time, onboarding, manager effort, productivity ramp-up, lost client knowledge and operational disruption can all matter.
Instead of repeating generic statements such as “replacing an employee costs 50% to 200% of salary,” calculate the cost for strategically important role groups using the organisation’s own data.
That calculation is more useful for investment decisions because it shows which turnover is genuinely expensive and where prevention has the strongest business case.
Retention in GCC, African and Asian organisations
Retention strategies should be adapted to the actual labour market rather than assuming U.S. survey percentages apply globally.
GCC organisations, for example, may need to analyse national and expatriate workforce segments separately, particularly where nationalisation policy, sponsorship, international mobility, housing or family considerations affect employment decisions. Organisations across African and Asian markets may face very different combinations of pay pressure, migration, skill scarcity, infrastructure, career opportunity and labour-market mobility.
The correct approach is local evidence: analyse your own departures, compare compensation and talent availability in the relevant market, and use external research as context rather than as a substitute for internal data.
A practical retention review
For each important workforce segment, answer:
- What is the voluntary and regrettable turnover rate?
- Where is turnover concentrated?
- What reasons do leavers give?
- What do current employees say would make them consider leaving?
- Are pay and benefits competitive for this labour market?
- Are workload and job expectations sustainable?
- Do employees have visible growth or mobility options?
- Are particular managers or teams experiencing unusual patterns?
- Which departures could realistically have been prevented?
- Which intervention can be measured over the next six to twelve months?
What organisations should conclude
Employee retention is not primarily a perks problem, a pay problem or a manager problem. It can be any of those depending on the workforce.
The strongest retention strategy is therefore diagnostic. Use current employee and labour-market evidence to identify the problem, intervene where the organisation has leverage, and measure whether the targeted outcome changes.
For many organisations that will mean a combination of competitive pay, manageable work, capable managers, clear development opportunities, credible career paths and a culture in which employees can raise concerns before they decide to leave.
Employee engagement and manager development at MATSH
Organisations addressing retention through manager capability can explore MATSH’s Employee Engagement Training Program and Leadership Fundamentals for Young Leaders. Training should be paired with internal retention data so its role in any change can be assessed rather than assumed.
Sources
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