Evaluating employee turnover and the adoption of modern retention strategies in Kenyan insurance firms

Abstract

Employee turnover and its relationship to retention strategies employed by firms is a complex area of study. Many investigations have been published about employee turnover and job satisfaction however; there is a paucity of information in the literature about the traditional and modern employee retention strategies and their effect on employee turnover. The purpose of this study therefore was to evaluate employee turnover and the adoption of modern employee retention strategies in the Insurance industry with a view of recommending strategies to reduce employee turnover. The study used the descriptive design and the methodology was quantitative. A multi stage sampling technique was used to select a sample of the top five insurance companies in Kenya and the respondents from the selected firms. The main instrument of data collection was a questionnaire. The findings indicate that the employee turnover rate in the insurance firms was moderately high but there were efforts by the respective management to reduce this rate. Inadequate and mismatched employee pay package as well as few promotion opportunities was regarded as the greatest cause of employee turnover in the firms. The most common traditional retention strategy employed by the firms was salary increments and subsidized insurance premiums for the employees. The findings also indicated that most of the modern retention strategies were used to a less extent though the develop-deploy-connect seemed to be gaining traction in use by the firms. The highlighted recommendation was that the firms should seek to employ modern retention strategies as they have been proven to be effective in developing economies.