A new survey claims that 75 per cent of organisations have no strategy or budget for employee retention.

The Employee Retention Survey 2008 by TalentDrain, an employee engagement and retention consultancy, is developed from a survey of HR practitioners in 316 organisations.

According to the results, 93 per cent have implemented retention initiatives over the past year, yet nearly half (47 per cent) still admit that they have a problem retaining staff and two-thirds say they want to reduce their employee turnover.

Authors Ron Eldridge and Anthony Miles argue that HR practitioners must take retention as seriously as they take recruitment and integrate it into their overall HR strategy. The report highlights the financial case for retention, given that the average cost to replace an employee is between £7,750-£11,000, with additional ‘costs’ such as lost opportunity time.

“HR practitioners pay lip service to retention but they still regard recruitment as more important. Unless more organisations monitor staff turnover, understand who is leaving, and why, and implement targeted interventions, then employee retention will continue to slip through the cracks,” said the authors.

According to the survey, 44 per cent of organisations have a staff turnover rate higher than 15 per cent per year, with one in 10 exceeding 30 per cent per year.

Whilst HR believe people leave because they haven’t been promoted or seek better wages, employees reveal other factors are actually driving them out, including ‘uninteresting work and boredom’ (25 per cent), ‘lack of training and development opportunities’ (25 per cent), ‘lack of teamwork and cooperation’ (19 per cent) and ‘promises not kept by management’ (17 per cent).

“HR practitioners regard ‘poor line management’ as the third highest contributor to employee turnover but only 13 per cent of leavers actually cite this as a reason for going,” said the authors.

“Our data shows that ‘relationships with colleagues’ is a more important factor. How can HR put in place effective retention initiatives if it doesn’t understand the real reasons why employees are leaving?”

The survey also suggests that a lack of honest and reliable exit data prevents HR practitioners from gaining a true picture of why employees leave. Just over half (57 per cent) of organisations use traditional face-to-face exit interviews as their main source of data to find out why people leave but only half of them aggregate the data, to reveal exit patterns, whilst only 4 per cent collect anonymous exit data.

An executive summary of the report can be downloaded at www.talentdrain.com