42% of employees who leave an organization say their manager could’ve prevented their move. That means companies aren’t doing enough to implement an employee retention plan that works.
When replacing someone costs anywhere from 40% to 200% of their salary, people departing unexpectedly gets costly. So what can you do to improve your employee retention plan?
Start with your onboarding
First impressions matter, and your onboarding is the first time someone sees inside your company. If job descriptions are the window dressing, and interviews are your shop floor, then onboarding is the first time they open the doors to enter your stockroom. And if they don’t like what they see, they won’t stay — a third of turnover happens within the first year.
Your onboarding can change that.
Onboarding is easy to underestimate and even easier to get wrong. But it’s an essential part of an effective employee retention plan. Only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization’s onboarding is “great,” proving that there’s something almost every organization can do to improve theirs.
Onboarding can be a stressful time for everyone, but with a defined process it becomes easier and faster.
You design it once (or once for each department), then you only need to make periodic updates, such as if policies or staff contacts change.
Your onboarding should include:
- Introductions to key colleagues (ideally in person or on a call, before there are any stakes or difficult decisions involved)
- Policies they need to know like health and safety
- How to book PTO
- Who to contact when they’re sick
- Approval chains (for example in marketing, who decides when a social media post is ready to go live?)
- How to use any tools they need, along with login details
To make onboarding easier, make sure you know who’s responsible for creating/deleting accounts for each of your tools. That way it’s quicker to set up accounts when someone new joins, and you/the new hire knows who to speak to if something goes wrong.
On top of that, when someone does leave, you know who should delete their account to remove any potential security risks.
Train managers
Managers are the top reason people leave a job. Over 70% of employees would quit because of a bad manager. Considering managers are who employees typically deal with the most, can you blame anyone for quitting if they hate their boss?
Most managers never get any formal management training, despite people management being a completely different skill than the one people are often promoted from.
Knowing how to lead a team doesn’t happen by osmosis; it requires active work.
If someone doesn’t know where to get that advice, they’re more likely to make it up as they go along. Which is only going to end badly for their employees and your company’s retention efforts.
The solution is simple: train your managers! They need to understand how to handle employee conflict, how to talk about difficult subjects, ways to lead with empathy and so much more. If you want your employee retention plan to actually work, you need to include manager training as a key component.
Don’t create a culture of fear
There are a couple of ways a business can create a culture of fear.
Firstly, if someone is constantly worried about their job. Companies that do endless rounds of layoffs make employees afraid that they’ll be on the chopping block next.
So then they either work themselves to the point of burnout, or they switch off and don’t bother, because what’s the point if they’ll be let go soon? Layoffs can do more harm than good if your employee retention plan doesn’t support the team members you want to stick around.
Secondly, if employees don’t feel able to speak up when something is wrong, or able to challenge the status quo.
Just because something has always been done the same way, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do something.
Unfortunately, I’ve had the displeasure in the past of working with managers who say that they’re open to criticism, but then when criticized, shut that person down. Or worse, let them go. That is not healthy. It is a culture of fear.
Nobody should feel trapped in a role that makes them feel unsafe. It has negative consequences for their physical and mental health. Not just in terms of stress and burnout, but in terms of chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and more.
Work on your culture
Culture, engagement, and work-life balance are the main reasons 69% of employees leave.
Company culture requires ongoing work. If you start to neglect it, it will inevitably deteriorate. It needs to be included in your employee retention plan.
Everything from how your CEO talks to employees, to how colleagues speak to one another, reflects and impacts your company culture. These have a far bigger impact than how much free food you give someone or how fancy the chairs are in your office.
Treat employees with respect — and get them to do the same with each other
At work, we will inevitably disagree with colleagues. That shouldn’t descend into arguments or personal jabs, though.
The ability to agree to disagree, or have a polite debate, seems to have been eroded by the internet. It doesn’t have to be that way, though.
If you want to create a healthy work environment, you need to show your employees how to be respectful to one another. That starts with how managers speak to each other, and employees, within meetings.
It’s especially visible when senior leaders disagree with one another. If things get nasty, it can quickly make the rest of the team uncomfortable.
There’s no need for that.
Teach your team how to communicate calmly and fairly, without losing their temper.
At the end of the day, most of us aren’t running countries or working in healthcare. None of it is actually as important as we’d like to think. It isn’t worth arguing over. Remembering that can help you design an employee retention plan that goes the distance.
Conclusion
Company culture is central to employee retention in 2026. Employees need to feel safe working for your organization, and that comes from your managers’ attitudes, workplace communication policies, and whether or not they feel invisible. Seemingly simple things, but actually, ones that have a huge impact on how people within your business feel working for you.
Want to gather input to improve your employee retention plan? With Workrowd, you can send employee feedback surveys — and it’ll analyze the results for you. Less effort, more info. Get in touch to find out more.
