Employee retention is a company's ability to keep its employees over time and reduce the number who leave, usually expressed as a rate.
Retention is the flip side of turnover. A high retention rate means most of your people stay, which protects knowledge, saves the cost of constant rehiring, and keeps teams stable and productive.
Retention is shaped across the whole employee journey, from a strong first impression in onboarding to good managers, growth, and fair pay. The teams that improve it treat it as a signal to watch and act on, not a number they check once a year.