Will They Stay or Will They Go? Exploring a Customer-Oriented Approach To Employee Retention

Keeping or losing the best workers can be critical to whether an organization can maintain a competitive advantage and whether operations in the organization run smoothly and efficiently. Simply stated, if the best workers are not retained, an organization can be negatively affected from the operational to the strategic level. This article focuses on employee retention from the perspective of a customer-based model. This approach considers employees as internal customers of management and the model provides organizations ways to influence whether employees decide to stay or go. Additionally, the model distinguishes retention practices based upon the value of employees to the organization. Measurement and application issues are identified along with directions for future research.