Retaining Your Highly Skilled Employees for Strategic Growth: Lessons for Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs), From a Digital Marketing Agency

Our qualitative, in-depth case study identified employee turnover as a barrier to strategic growth and profitability in an SME digital agency, exacerbated by today’s work culture, where high levels of avoidable dysfunctional turnover is becoming the norm. There is a shortage of in-depth research into this phenomenon within SMEs; existing literature often tends to focus on financial factors that contribute to employee retention, motivation and satisfaction. This research therefore explores employee retention in the case study business, in order to give insights on employee retention that may be useful to other similar SMEs. This study contributes, in particular, to the stream of research on financial and non-financial rewards and the importance of retaining employee talent. The research uses multiple data collection methods: semi-structured interviews with management and business consultants and online questionnaires with current and former employees. We found that non-financial aspects played an important role in employee motivation and retention, corroborating the need for an approach that covers both aspects. We propose key takeaways for managing this strategic human resource challenge in SMEs. This research paves the way for future research. The in-depth nature of the research allows a fuller appreciation of takeaways and how they work out over time.