2.6 Retention Strategy Analysis

2.6 RETENTION STRATEGIES
The human aspect is fundamental to the achievement of organisational objectives. As a result, it becomes necessary that organisations have to set in place strategies to preserve their labour force. As stated by Peterson (2005), “it is incredibly frustrating to go through a long hiring process, employees training, providing uniform and other necessities and then have the employee to quit after a period of time. Then you start over again.”
Below are the three main reasons about why an effective retention strategy is important:
 To extend an employee’s stay in the business and reduce employees turnover levels
 To raise satisfaction levels and consequently increasing productivity and profitability
 To develop an employer

Employees want extra time for their social life, leisure and in several cases to have time to accomplish their family commitments.
Two major negative impacts that a poor work life balance may have on the company would be labour turnover and loss of quality and performance.
A number of work life balance programmes are for examples: different work arrangements, leave for children’s school functions, compressed worksheet, job sharing, on-site child/adult care, employee assistance plans, on-site health services, wellness programs, fitness facility amongst others.
In accordance with the University College London (UCL, 2011), people will be more creative if they have a work-life balance that allows them to assume any responsibility outside the workplace.
As a result, work-life balance can be used as a retention plan by promoting flexibility and by ensuring that employees are not over killed with their work

On the words of Gustafson, “A strong positive correlation exists between increased level of employee training and decreased turnover” (Gustafson 2002, p.107).
Employee growth referred to as human resource development (HRD), is about the provision of learning, developing and training opportunities with the intention of improving individual team and organisational performance (Armstrong, 1996).
As per Stravrou et al., (2004 cited in Nikandrou et al., 2009), one of the most important challenges faced by employers consists of issues of training and development. In accordance with Bushardt et al., (1994 cited in Choo and Bowley 2007) training employees end result is advance skills, rising professionalism, boosting employee loyalty and satisfaction to the organisation.
Chiang et al. (2005) inspected the correlation between training, job satisfaction and the intention to stay and the findings put forward that training quality was definitely related to job satisfaction and the intention to