The Role of Retention Strategies in Enhancing Employee Satisfaction: An Empirical Study

Background: Employee turnover is today recognised as one of the critical issues facing today’s organisations and businesses in their attempt to achieve and sustain operational continuity in today’s competitive market. Not only does high turnover result in interference of organizational operations but costs such as recruitment and training and loss of productivity is very costly. In order to overcome these challenges, organizations have started to pay attention towards the factors influencing retention with the view to improve the satisfaction levels of their employees. This paper aims at investigating the correlated factors established between retention strategies and employees’ satisfaction with the help of data obtained from 200 participants. Data Collection: The study was a cross-sectional survey with 200 employees by selected departments of a mid –sized organization. The measure used in the survey was a set of questions that were crafted with a view to capturing the opinions of the employees with regard to retention practices such as career development, flexible time schedules, reward systems, and informative management. Also included in the survey was the level of job satisfaction and the probability of the employees staying with the organisation. Using statistical tests, comparisons of retention strategies as well as their relationship to satisfaction levels for the employees were made. Findings: The findings were that implementing both monetary and non-monetary retention strategies improves the scores of employee satisfaction. Major sources of satisfaction were related to concerns for career mobility (expressed by 78 percent of participants), flexibility between work and outside life (65 percent), praise and incentives (60 percent), and organization culture (72%). The research also revealed that low level of management communication and engagement for retention was also important, 70 percent of the employees stated that, they felt more satisfied when they understood that management concerned for their growth and happiness. Results: According to the survey data, the overall satisfaction score of the employees majoring their organization’s retention strategies was 30 percent higher than the overall score of the employees who accused their organizations’ strategies of being inadequate. Furthermore, there was a significant decrease of twenty-five percent in turnover intentions for employees who perceived organisational commitment to retain them. The implication of these findings is that there is a positive relationship between sound retention policies and realization of higher levels of employee satisfaction hence better turnover. Conclusion: The study therefore finds that retention strategies act as a central function to improving employee satisfaction and low turnover. Employers who pay attention to the promotion of sound retention strategy plans that seek to address both the technical and individual facets of their workers are likely to have contented employees who will not seek employment elsewhere. The results show the need for ongoing assessment .