Understanding Employee Retention: A Psychological Perspective

Personal Application
Retention was always a term that I used loosely but who knew this term would effect the workplace so greatly. As a human resource major, employee retention is something that I would have to deal with or encounter often. This topic was interesting to me for various reasons. Also retention is a topic that interest many companies and it is something that needs to be understood before hiring.
As I researched and viewed my topic, I realized that retention is broader then I thought. All along I thought retention was just about retaining employees but I found out the system to retain employees and it’s factors. I found the key elements that effect retention to be very interesting. I didn’t know that retention can be broken down into to 3 dimensions which are social,mental,and physical. The social consist of the contact with people, mental consist of work characteristics, and physical consist of working conditions and pay. These three elements show that retention can be broken down psychologically. Since the terms can be broken down psychologically, it allows an employee to look into retention more closely. I

The term actually means “adhering to the fundamentals of employer-employee relationship day after day, week after week”(Soma, 2015). According to Soma, it takes a lot of sincere efforts to motivate employees, keep them satisfied and retain them. Unfortunately commitment towards employees is only found among a few organizations that have a retention package implemented (Soma, 2015). In order to succeed in employee retention, the leadership will have to make sure it is aligned with many principles. Also they have to be willing to take chances whether its rough or smooth to have a retention package (Soma, 2015). Once a work environment is in place, the organization will be able to achieve a “world class employee retention process” (Soma,