You need to prioritize retaining your best employees through your HR. Learn about 4 lesser-known benefits of employee retention to find out why.
Jess DeVore
Published:
September 6, 2023
Last updated:
September 17, 2023
Searching high and low for the perfect employee to fill a complicated role can be difficult. It stresses you out if you’re already short-staffed and in a rush to get more hands as quickly as possible.
Of course, it would be preferable not to worry about hiring at all. Retaining employees you already have can be a lot simpler than constantly hiring. And it can benefit your business too.
While you’re probably familiar with some of the benefits of employee retention, there are several hidden advantages of employee retention that you may not have considered.
If you’re ready to get motivated to kick your retention efforts into high gear and retain your top talent, keep reading and learn some of the lesser-known benefits of staff retention.
Why employee retention is important
Employee retention is important because it can improve the productivity of an organization.
Organizations with high employee retention profit from increased employee engagement, higher employee morale, more experienced employees, and lower employee turnover costs.
That’s why 91% of Human Resources leaders are concerned about employee turnover in the near future.
Besides the revenue, companies with a lower turnover rate can spend time on their employees, build a cohesive company culture, and achieve innovations that outperform their high-churn counterparts.
Employee retention’s effect extends beyond your annual revenue or quarterly performance reports — it improves each day for your workers, managers, and customers.
In short, it’s hard to overstate the importance of effective employee retention strategies as they can impact just about every aspect of your business, including revenue, service, and company culture.
1. More quality hires
Hiring typically increases when employees leave your company. So it should decrease as your retention goes up.
The hidden benefit of high retention is that you can allocate more resources to the time-consuming job of sourcing new hires. You can be more selective in finding candidates with relevant experience and perfect cultural fit instead of rushing to fill a vacancy.
The candidates you hire this way are more likely to stick around and better fit your organization, which further improves your retention rate.
Ultimately, more employees staying means more business growth and more new positions. You can focus your hiring efforts on adding to the team rather than replacing previous talent.
2. Better employee training
Hiring new employees takes up a significant portion of your company’s HR budget and time. It’s estimated that replacing an employee costs anywhere from 50% to 200% of their annual salary.
Retaining just one extra employee means thousands of dollars saved you can use in other areas.
One often-neglected management area is training, with 78% of workers saying they want more training. By saving on hiring, you can spend on training.
With more time for training, your employees will be happier, more skilled, and even more likely to stay with your organization.
3. Improved customer relationships
Most of your return customers and clients don’t think of your business as a logo or physical store. They think of the person with whom they interacted. Your employees are the face of your business, from frontline workers up to account managers.
Your customers rely on your employee’s knowledge of their needs and history with the company to deliver the highest level of service. So when an employee leaves, the relationships they built with your customer base leave with them.
A PWC report found that 80% of Americans think a knowledgeable staff is the most important element to customer satisfaction, along with speed and convenience. They also pay more for things when they experience a positive customer experience.
The benefits of employee retention reach beyond your current staff and bottom line and impact the customer experience. A high employee retention rate ultimately improves your clients’ and customers’ perception of your business.
4. Faster progress
While onboarding and formal training programs are essential for satisfied, efficient employees, these resources are hardly the only way employees learn on the job.
One of the most valuable sources of guidance and information is your current employees. Studies show that 91% of employees with a workplace mentor are happy with their jobs.
By retaining most of your employees, you get:
Strong relationships between your employees that impact their performance
Employees who possess in-depth knowledge in their fields
Great mentors who have the technical skills and know little-known tricks in the field to help the newcomers
You benefit from the perks of high employee retention: Employees have a wealth of team members to turn to when they have a question or need advice. This turns your newest employees into your best employees.
Also, when turnover is low, you keep the work environment of cultural cohesion and the know-how of experienced employees. This results in less stress and high productivity.
Final thoughts: 4 hidden benefits of employee retention you should know
Why retain employees? The answer is clear.
The benefits of employee retention are wide-reaching for your entire organization. Employees, management, and customers all reap the benefits of employee retention.
Employees benefit from greater satisfaction, higher productivity, and better support on the job. Employers can enjoy greater profit and less uncertainty. And your customers can rely on consistently high-quality and personalized customer service.
These benefits are well worth the expense of managing incentives like healthcare, training, and work-life balance.
If you’re ready to improve your employee retention, an all-in-one employee communication tool like Blink can maximize your organization’s initiatives.
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Retention rate is a ratio of the total current employees and the employees at a previous point in time in the same positions at your company. You can calculate it annually or quarterly.
It provides a snapshot of how satisfied your employees are at your company.
A high retention rate indicates your employees enjoy the work they’re doing, fit in with your culture, and receive fair pay.
Conversely, a low retention rate means that one or more of those elements are less than ideal. Since retention rate is inversely related to employee turnover rate, low retention means high turnover.
Knowing your employee retention rate’s status, you can evaluate and adjust your employee retention strategies. When your employee retention rate improves, you know your retention efforts are paying off.
Measuring employee retention rate
To find your organization’s employee retention rate, you need data on the total number of employees with your organization at the beginning of a period and the number of employees who remain at the end. From there, you can quickly calculate your retention rate.
How to calculate employee retention rate
Find how many employees left your company in a period. Subtract that number from your total headcount at the start of the period. Divide the remaining number of employees by the initial headcount. The result should be a decimal. Multiply that number by 100 to find the retention rate in percentage.
Here’s what that looks like in the employee retention formula:
For example, let’s say you want to calculate your annual retention rate.
You started the year with 56 employees and ended with 50 employees. Here’s how you can find the retention rate:
56 - 6 = 50
50/56 = 0.8928
0.89 x 100 = 89
So in this scenario, the retention rate is 89%
Employee retention rate vs. employee turnover rate
Whenever we talk about staff retention rate, it’s also common to hear staff turnover rate. We use them interchangeably because they’re two sides of the same coin.
While retention rate measures how many people stayed, turnover is the measure of how many people left.
Similarly, you might be confused about attrition rate and employee churn rate. They are just other names for turnover rate.
How to calculate employee turnover rate
You can do so by:
Sum the total employees at the beginning and end of the time interval.
Divide by two to get the average number of employees.
Divide the total number of separations for a given time by the average number of employees.
For monthly turnover, you will work with this:
Suppose a company begins the month with 32 employees. Four employees leave, and six new employees join. So the company ends the month with 34 employees.
The average number of employees is:
(32+34)/2 = 33
Next, we find the turnover:
4/33 = 0.1212
Multiplying by 100, the turnover rate is 12%.
What is a good employee retention rate?
A good employee retention rate varies from industry to industry.
Retail and restaurants tend to have lower industry average retention rates than other sectors, while government and federal sectors have the highest retention rates.
The overall market and economy also affect your retention rate. During times of high uncertainty or in a strong talent market, retention may decrease for every industry. For example, turnover in 2020 was 57.3%, making it 20% higher than the previous year.
According to Built In, average retention rates range from 70-90%.
Following this logic, a good retention rate is somewhere above 75%. But for frontline organizations that deal with restaurant and retail, a retention rate above 50% is also decent.
Final thoughts: how to find your employee retention rate
Calculating your employee retention is an important metric while running your business. It can tell you a lot about how your employees feel at your company.
The same is true for turnover rate as that lets you know where the fault lies.
Use both metrics to get a complete picture of your business and employ retention strategies to keep your top talent around.
If you’re looking for a new way to keep your employees engaged, Blink is an all-in-one employee communications app that can help you stay connected to your employees and boost retention.
High rates of frontline employee churn have been a persistent challenge.
But after the period of job hopping that occurred around the Great Resignation, there was an unexpected period of workforce stability in 2025 and into 2026.
Many have interpreted this as cause for celebration. If retention figures are stabilizing — or even improving — it’s proof that your frontline turnover strategy has been successful, right?
Unfortunately, that’s not the whole story… In an era of job hugging and quiet staying, there’s an uncomfortable question that every organization should be asking. It’s this:
Are workers staying with us because they want to — or because they feel they have nowhere else to go?
That distinction makes a huge difference to employee engagement, employee input, and long-term loyalty. And it’s exactly what we’re going to be looking at through the course of this article.
The "job hugging" trend explained
Job huggers are employees who cling to their current role out of financial anxiety rather than genuine commitment. They’re choosing a steady paycheck and stability over change and growth.
According to one recent study, 75% of workers are planning to job hug their way through 2026 and 2027 — not because they’re thriving, but because economic uncertainty has made moving feel too risky.
Let’s be clear. These employees are not engaged. They’re not loyal in any meaningful sense. They’re simply staying put because the cost-of-living squeeze, a cooling labor market, and an uncertain economic outlook have raised the personal risk of leaving.
Why low turnover isn't an automatic win
Low turnover figures can feel like a validation of your frontline turnover strategy. But on their own, they fail to tell you whether workers are actually engaged — or simply stuck.
It’s important to find out where your employees stand because disengaged workers, those who stay purely for the paycheck, create a specific and underappreciated set of problems:
They drain productivity. An employee who is present but not invested is unlikely to bring discretionary effort. They do the minimum required and no more. Across a large frontline workforce, this has a significant impact on productivity.
They infect team morale. Disengagement is contagious. When a significant proportion of workers are going through the motions — without enthusiasm, initiative, or investment in the work — it pulls down the performance and morale of colleagues around them.
They deliver worse customer experiences.Customers experience your brand through your frontline teams. Employees who are checked out deliver a sub-par service — and that harms customer satisfaction scores, repeat business, and brand perception.
They leave the moment conditions change. When the jobs market improves, when a too-good-to-miss opportunity appears, or when the economic pressure eases, job huggers leave. Retention figures fall rapidly when external conditions shift.
This is the difference between job hugging and genuine frontline employee retention. While the headcount looks the same, employee engagement metrics tell a very different story.
How to tell the difference between job hugging and genuine engagement
Frontline employee retention rates tell you who’s still on the payroll. This can be a useful metric. But only when viewed alongside other KPIs.
Low eNPS. Employee Net Promoter Score — the measure of how likely employees are to recommend your organization as a place to work — is a direct indicator of engagement. Job huggers will score their employer poorly because they’re tolerating, rather than enjoying, being part of your organization.
High absenteeism. Disengaged employees take more sick days. They're less resilient under pressure and less invested in showing up consistently. Rising absenteeism — particularly in specific teams or locations — often signals disengagement before it shows up in exit data.
Low survey participation. Employees who feel connected to their organization participate in feedback processes because they believe their input matters. Job huggers don't. And if your survey response rates are low, you're not getting an accurate picture of engagement. You're hearing from the committed minority.
Low internal comms engagement. Open rates, content interactions, and platform activity levels are all signs of engagement. Employees who are invested read company updates, react to recognition posts, and participate in communities. A gap between headcount and comms engagement is another indicator of fragile retention.
What job huggers actually need: Five drivers of frontline employee engagement
The answer to job hugging isn’t a pizza party or a one-off recognition event. Employee engagement on the frontline requires targeted engagement strategies, built around the realities of shift-based, deskless work.
Here’s what will really move the dial.
1. Visibility into growth opportunities
Job huggers often stay because they can’t see a better option elsewhere. So why not show them one within your organization? Clear development pathways and regular career conversations signal there’s a future worth staying for.
You can also deliver training that meets frontline employees where they are — on their smartphones and in the time between shifts.
2. A sense of connection to the team and mission
Employees who understand how their work contributes to the organization’s goals — and who feel connected to their immediate team — are significantly more resilient through periods of uncertainty.
You can achieve this with the help of mobile-first chat tools and co-worker communities — channels that enable interaction and connection.
3. Consistent communication
Frontline employees sometimes check out because they feel peripheral — uninformed about what's happening in the organization and unclear on how decisions are being made.
Regular, relevant, mobile-first communication via an interactive news feed reaches every frontline worker directly. It removes that sense of exclusion and keeps team members in the loop.
4. A voice
Job huggers are often employees whose feedback has gone unheard for so long that they’ve stopped offering it.
Two-way communication channels — like surveys, polls, and leadership Q&As — give frontline workers a route to raise concerns, ask questions, and influence decisions. They help to rebuild the trust that drives engagement.
5. Recognition
Consistent, visible recognition is another important driver of frontline engagement. Employees who feel seen and appreciated are significantly less likely to be counting the days until they can jump ship.
If recognition isn’t currently a big part of the frontline experience at your organization, provide channels for peer-to-peer and manager-led praise. Aim to build appreciation into company culture, so it’s a daily, not once-a-year event.
Turning “quiet staying” into lasting loyalty with Blink
The good news is that job huggers aren’t lost causes. They may be disengaged. But they’re still there, working for your organization.
That means there’s still an opportunity to build the connection and recognition that turns reluctant retention into genuine loyalty.
Making that shift requires insight and infrastructure. Insight into which employees are actively engaged and which are quietly staying. And the infrastructure to deliver a better frontline employee experience.
Blink is built to provide both:
Analytics and reports that reveal who’s engaged and where engagement is dropping, segmented by team, manager, and location.
A consolidated mobile-first platform that gives every frontline worker — regardless of their role or shift — access to company communication, peer connection, recognition, and self-serve tools.
With software to track and improve frontline engagement, you can start turning job huggers into loyal company advocates. Now, that’s real cause for celebration.
Demand for home health aides is higher than ever. The job outlook for home health and personal care aides is projected to be 25% between 2021 and 2031 — meaning that, as a workforce, home health and personal care is expected to grow an incredible 20 percentage points more versus other industries.
This poses a significant challenge for home health care providers, not just in recruiting enough carers to answer to demand but in retaining these staff members as well.
The Great Resignation, high employee turnover, and decreasing job satisfaction are all impacting home health organizations in line with the wider healthcare industry. Tackling these issues starts with addressing the factors that cause them in the first place.
In this guide, we'll walk you through the numerous different factors that can influence employee retention, before diving into exactly how to increase employee retention in home health care.
If you're an HR or Operations leader in a home health care organization, keep reading to learn how you can successfully retain your valuable employees — and improve patient care and business outcomes in the process.
What causes attrition in healthcare?
Staff turnover is a natural and necessary process in all healthcare organizations. However, when turnover reaches high levels it can have a detrimental effect on the quality of care as well as being costly. And it's high levels that we're seeing.
Further problems arise when employees leave not only the organization but the health workforce itself.
By understanding and addressing employee retention and the factors that drive it, home health and personal care leaders can minimize staff attrition and the associated impact on cost of, and quality of, patient care.
Below, we’ll take a closer look at each of these three dimensions and how they affect retention, before diving into actionable initiatives leading to improving employee retention throughout your home health organization.
What's important to remember is that each of these factors overlaps to create engaging, positive employee experiences and ensure retention. It's not a case of nailing just one of these categories but creating meaningful change in all three.
1. Employment quality
Employment quality is a key factor in retention and includes aspects like pay and benefits, job security, and working conditions. Other elements of employment quality relate to home health workers having direct lines of communication with their employer and being able to swap and fill shifts easily in order to support the work-life balance they seek.
Getting employment quality right is a particular challenge for home health and personal care organizations. For one, home health co-workers are typically more distributed than other healthcare teams. These are employees who leave their homes in the morning to visit patients at their homes and may rarely, or never, even step foot in a shared office or HQ.
And yet, home health organizations cannot deprioritize employee quality conditions — they can't settle for simply paying staff more in order to boost retention, as many have tried to do. As Gartner states:
"Monetary compensation is important for surviving, but deeper relationships, a strong sense of community, and purpose-driven work are essential to thriving."
That leads us to the concepts of work and organizational quality...
2. Work quality
Work quality includes the levels of responsibility, autonomy, and stress experienced in the workplace.
Without going into any more detail than that, it quickly becomes clear how essential work quality is for healthcare workers. Few roles carry such a degree of responsibility and demand as much from employees. The scope for stressful situations is limitless — and to make matters worse, home health aides often feel isolated from the rest of their co-workers and the organization at large, meaning that when they start to feel stressed they have no one to turn to for support.
Work quality also relates to the technology provided to health professionals to help them succeed in their roles. With52% of frontline workers claiming they'd leave their job over tech tools, it’s clear to see the impact that the right workplace technology has on work quality and employee retention.
3. Organizational quality
Organizational quality also impacts employee retention: the culture of the organization and the way that employees are managed and rewarded (or not) all play a key role here. Organizational quality can also refer to levels of organizational innovation, such as improvement programs or digitization initiatives.
Blink research shows that health and care workers overwhelmingly feel unheard and undervalued in their organizations. Unsurprisingly, the same research showed 50% are considering leaving, or have recently left, their jobs.
Simply put, organizations with a positive culture, good management practices, and fair reward systems are more likely to retain their employees. On the other hand, companies with poor organizational quality are far more likely to experience high levels of turnover.
7 ways to increase employee retention in home health care
Turning attrition trends around is a big task. Businesses need to think bigger than compensation and make bigger commitments to the overall employee experience.
All roles in health and personal care must get the status and respect they deserve. But how can you, as business and HR leaders, provide that?
1. Collect and analyze data
Up-to-date workforce data should be at the center of an effective retention strategy, helping you better target your employment, work, and organizational quality improvements. By collecting and analyzing data and identifying trends in your home health workforce, you can identify the starting point for your activities.
Understanding the profile of your workforce will help you to assess the risk points and ensure that retention issues affecting particular groups are addressed. For example, are retention issues organization-wide or specific to certain staff groups, demographics, departments, or teams?
For a home health provider, this will likely include looking at retention rates between carers employed directly by your organization vs agency staff vs workers brought in through other schemes like CDPAP. Carers indirectly employed by your organization might feel less connected to the company mission and vision — failing to meet their organizational quality needs as a result.
Getting to know the drivers of employee turnover, and who they impact in your specific organization, can help you create targeted initiatives to improve retention. If the data shows heavy attrition after 30 or 60 days, you might focus on creating an effective, engaging onboarding program to help new hires hit the ground running.
Making it happen
One way to improve employee retention is through the use of regular Employee Pulse Surveys. By conducting regular pulse surveys, you can ensure that you have a constant understanding of how your employees feel about their work.
This will help you address any potential retention issues before they become a major problem or spiral into quiet quitting. Additionally, pulse surveys can help to improve employee engagement and job satisfaction, which can lead to improved retention rates.
You can also use tools like Blink’s Frontline Intelligence feature to collect and analyze critical employee engagement data and metrics, helping you to understand exactly where your healthcare workforce is feeling unengaged and unsatisfied.
2. Offer relevant training and development opportunities
Healthcare organizations that offer relevant training and professional development are more likely to retain their most valuable employees. It cannot be underestimated how valued and invested in healthcare workers will feel when their skills are being developed and their careers are progressing.
This answers to all of the three factors explored:
Employment quality (as it opens the doors to higher pay)
Work quality (through professional development)
and organizational quality (as it creates a culture of progress and support)
Making it happen
Training and development programs for home health and personal care workers might include formal training programs, such as classroom-based learning or online courses. It might also include more customized opportunities, such as one-on-one mentoring or job shadowing.
What's essential to identify, however, is how these programs will be delivered. Technology will be crucial to bridge the gap between HQ and home health aides.
3. Lighten the load
An increasing number of health and care workers are struggling to balance the demands of their job with other aspects of their life, such as parenting or caring responsibilities. This often leads to stress and burnout; an early indicator of disengagement, and ultimately attrition. In some instances, burnout in healthcare staff has also been linked to medical errors and patient safety incidents.
To improve retention in healthcare, organizations must commit to creating a working environment where employees feel supported by their home health co-workers and managers — even if they rarely see them face-to-face — and are not overburdened with inflexible workloads.
Making it happen
Organizations can take a number of steps to lighten a home health worker's cognitive load:
Providing more resources to team members and managers in a mobile and easy-to-access Hub for on-the-go support
Implementing intuitive scheduling solutions and shift-swapping tools that can be used for real-time coordination and employee flexibility
Encouraging work-life balance through a culture of peer support, so that co-workers can easily tap into the knowledge and experience of their peers
4. Consistent communication
Another factor that often impacts your employment quality is the consistency of your communication. Consistent two-way communication is essential for lasting relationships — and it can be one of your most powerful tools for encouraging employee retention.
Blink's research found that close to one-fifth of frontline workers don’t receive relevant communications from their organization. Organizations can create a sense of community and trust among their staff to minimize attrition by ensuring that all employees:
Receive updates relevant to them
Are part of the right team chats
Can easily share their ideas and concerns
You can also use regular communication to obtain direct insight into how specific healthcare workers or teams are feeling about their work. This can help you to identify retention issues and create targeted interventions as needed.
Making it happen
Effective communication needs to be tailored to the specific needs of different staff groups. For home health and personal care aides, it will undoubtedly be about regular mobile updates and using Feed and Chat features to create energy and enthusiasm among your distributed workforce.
Read how Blink helped solve a million-dollar communication challenge for the home health organization, Elara Caring. Through deploying a number of transformative digital initiatives through Blink, 95% of Elara Caring's personal care, home health, and hospice care workers now feel more connected to the organization.
5. Focus on employee engagement
Employee engagement can be a powerful tool for improving retention, as it has been linked to higher levels of satisfaction and commitment among workers.
Healthcare organizations can create a work quality that is more attractive to top performers by getting to know the latest employee engagement trends, providing the right digital tools for key workers to engage intuitively, and regularly assessing the effectiveness of their efforts.
Engaging employees ultimately retains them.
Additionally, research by HBR shows that higher employee engagement levels can lead to a number of improved outcomes, not just retention. These include care costs (including legal action taken by a patient against a provider for negligent complications) and treatment effectiveness and patient outcomes (measured by the rate patients are readmitted).
Making it happen
To increase employee engagement, healthcare organizations should focus on creating a culture that values the opinions and input of employees. This might include activities like surveys or direct feedback, regular communications from leadership, and targeted recognition programs.
One transformative way to improve employee engagement in your healthcare organization is to pave the way with Blink, the powerful mobile employee engagement app that frontline workers love. With a suite of features perfect for healthcare, Blink will help you create a culture of engagement and retention in your organization.
"Meaningful recognition can help to motivate and retain our NHS people. Setting in place a holistic reward package, which is relevant to staff needs, can be key to ensuring your organization, and the wider NHS, retains its staff."
But recognition is more than a pat on the back. Driving real recognition for employees needs to be an ongoing, holistic process that inspires your healthcare workforce to feel valued, motivated, and connected to the company.
Making it happen
While some companies may view the idea of regular rewards or incentives as impractical, Blink is a mobile employee recognition solution that makes it easy to provide targeted and consistent recognition to specific individuals or teams.
With features like real-time feedback, team and group chatting, and, of course, Employee Recognition, your healthcare organization can unlock the power of recognition as a retention tool. And with its wider suite of handy features, Blink is the perfect way to engage employees in your healthcare organization and help you retain talent.
7. Listen and action feedback
Over a third (35%) of frontline healthcare workers feel that their feedback will not be acted on by their organization. Unsurprisingly, half of frontline healthcare staff have changed or considered changing their job.
"By taking the time to listen and communicate, we can create a better and more supportive environment within healthcare," says Sean Nolan, CEO at Blink.
Through more effective communication, leaders feel more connected to their frontline, and frontline employees feel valued and listened to. This results in higher retention, increased productivity, and better two-way conversations.
Making healthcare workers feel heard needs to be a priority for any healthcare organization. By listening to their feedback and acting on it, you will be able to create a more supportive workplace culture that retains top talent — leading to reduced costs associated with employee turnover.
Making it happen
To effectively ensure your team is heard and their feedback is acted on, you need the right tech to manage it all smoothly. With the Blink employee app, you can listen to your employees and act on their feedback in real time, meaning they won't feel ignored or undervalued.
By using the powerful features of Blink, you can help create a culture where frontline workers feel heard and respected while focusing on:
Encouraging two-way feedback through regular surveys and communications from leadership
Ensuring feedback is acted on and implemented into business processes, updating employees on the progress of their feedback so they know they’re being heard
Integrating your mobile app with workplace technologies like HR systems, payroll platforms, and more, to streamline the employee experience and implement feedback effectively across your organization
Listen and action feedback - Regularly collect and act on feedback, update employees on actions taken
Retention next steps
Blink is the industry-leading frontline engagement app that connects management and frontline teams to build stronger organizations. With a proven adoption rate of 92% in care sectors, it’s never been this easy to unify the frontline. At Blink, we believe in empowering frontline organizations by helping you enable, engage and understand your workforce.
Our app provides a host of features that support employee retention in home health, such as employee surveys, polls, secure team and group chats and channels, employee recognition, and healthcare-friendly HR tools.
By using the app effectively, you will be able to create a culture where employees are engaged and respected – ultimately reducing employee turnover costs and driving employee retention up. We are experts in frontline engagement and retention and would love to help you achieve your goals.
Most frontline workers who quit don’t do it on day one.
And they don’t do it at the one-year mark, either. They do it somewhere around Day 90.
When you look at what’s happening — or not happening — between weeks two and twelve, it’s not hard to see why.
Frontline employees are caught in a hinterland. A place after induction and before real engagement kicks in, where the comms, connection, and support they need are nowhere to be found.
So what can you do to reduce employee churn once and for all? How do you persuade this group of employees to stick with you for the long haul?
Here, we take a look at why the 90-day milestone matters so much in frontline retention — and what a better frontline onboarding strategy can do for your organization.
The data behind the 90-day cliff edge
The figures are stark. A third of the HR pros responding to Enboarder’s 2025 HR Leader survey said that 25% of new employees leave during their first 90 days.
For frontline organizations, the picture is even more acute.
Turnover rates in frontline industries are consistently among the highest across all employment sectors — and 56% of organizations are currently experiencing frontline worker turnover at a higher rate than the historical average.
This frontline churn comes at a considerable cost. If we look at the example of grocery retail, frontline turnover absorbs as much as 10-20% of profits.
High frontline turnover results in lower service levels, lower productivity, higher training costs, and increased demands on management. It also keeps recruitment at the top of the strategic agenda, crowding out other priorities.
Why is Day 90 such a precarious time?
Day 90 is when new hire energy wears off and the reality of the role sets in. It’s when the gap between what was promised during recruitment and what’s actually experienced becomes impossible to ignore.
It’s also — critically — the point at which most organizations have stopped formally onboarding but haven’t yet started actively retaining. So frontline employee engagement takes a hit that it can be hard to recover from.
What frontline workers are telling us
Wondering why frontline employees quit? When frontline workers leave around the three-month mark, the reasons they give cluster around the same themes.
A two-tier culture
Almost half of frontline workers report that there are two separate cultures at play within their organizations — one for the frontline and one for everyone else.
That perception is compounded by a clear digital gap. Frontline workers receive just 1% of their companies’ total technology budget, leaving them with ineffective paper-based processes or software that doesn’t work on a smartphone.
The divide between desk-based and frontline experience is very real, very visible, and — for many — a deciding factor in whether to stay.
Feeling invisible
Only 43% of deskless workers feel seen and appreciated at work, compared with 61% of desk-based employees. A lack of recognition hits hard in the early months, when new hires are most in need of reassurance.
Frontline workers also struggle to make their voices heard. 38% say they have feedback for leadership or management, but no way of communicating it.
Feeling out of the loop
When new frontline workers don’t have reliable access to company updates, policy changes, or operational information, they feel disconnected from the organization and unable to do their jobs well.
Employees with strong workplace relationships are 51% more likely to be engaged. But shift-based work can be isolating.
New starters may work alongside different colleagues every day, have limited face time with their manager, and no easy channel to build relationships beyond their immediate shift.
Without deliberate effort to create connection, the social fabric that makes work worth showing up for simply doesn’t form.
Yet 64% of frontline employees say they would stay with their organizations for six years or more if they had access to better career development and training.
The appetite for growth is there, right from the start, but the pathway often isn’t.
The onboarding illusion: What companies are getting wrong
You’ve invested time and money in your frontline onboarding strategy. So why isn’t this moving the needle on new hire turnover?
The answer may lie not in the quality of your employee onboarding program, but in the length. In most frontline organizations, structured onboarding takes place in the first week or two. It’s thorough, well-intentioned. But it ends far too early.
A strong first week doesn’t prevent an exit at the three-month mark. That’s because there’s a significant gap between structured onboarding and what actually happens when a new worker hits the floor solo.
By week three or four, new-hire support has often evaporated. The questions keep coming — but now there’s no clear channel for asking them. Connection to the wider organization fades. The sense of momentum and progress, so strong in week one, starts to plateau.
That’s when employees start to question things. Is this worth it? Does this organization actually care whether I stay? Maybe there’s something better out there…
What the 90-day window actually needs: How to reduce employee churn
That means creating an onboarding strategy that doesn't end at week two, but continues to inform, connect, and support new workers long after they hit their stride.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Consistent communications
New frontline workers need to feel like they’re part of something bigger. That means regular, relevant updates that keep them informed about what’s happening in the organization — delivered to their smartphone, not to a desktop intranet they’ll never log into.
The goal is to make a new hire feel like an insider, not an afterthought — and to give them the frontline communications that make their work easier.
Peer community
One of the most powerful retention boosters in frontline work is strong relationships and collaboration with co-workers.
When new workers have a channel to connect with their team — beyond whoever happens to be on the same shift — belonging develops faster. Internal communities, group chats, and shared spaces for non-work conversation all contribute to that vital social infrastructure.
A way to ask questions without feeling stupid
New starters have lots of questions. Many of them don’t ask, because they don’t want to look like they’re struggling or don’t know what they’re doing.
A searchable knowledge hub — policies, procedures, and FAQs findable in seconds from a smartphone — removes that barrier. So does self-serve access to shift swapping, payslips, and benefits enrolment.
Employees who can find answers independently feel more capable and confident.
Visibility into what comes next
New hires who can see a trajectory within the organization are significantly more likely to be there beyond 90 days.
Regular check-ins, clearly communicated development opportunities, and recognition of early progress all signal that the organization is invested in the individual, not just the role they’re filling.
The solution? A well-designed employee experience software platform makes all the above possible. It allows you to deliver structured onboarding content at the right moment in the employee lifecycle — and to fill the day with culture and community-building touchpoints.
Time to rethink your frontline onboarding strategy?
There’s a temptation in high-turnover environments to pull back on investment in the frontline employee experience. Why put significant resources into someone who might leave in three months?
It’s a reasonable question. But fail to consider frontline EX and you end up stuck in a cycle of attrition (and associated costs) that’s impossible to escape.
The frontline organizations reducing employee churn are those making the first 90 days — not just the first few weeks — feel like the beginning of something worth sticking around for.
That means extending the onboarding process beyond the induction checklist, giving new workers the tools to stay connected and informed, and building the peer relationships that make a job feel more than a job.
A mobile-first frontline platform like Blink keeps deskless workers connected from day one — through structured onboarding journeys, communications that reach every employee, recognition and survey tools, and co-worker communities.
With everything available from one user-friendly dashboard, new hires have everything they need to hit the ground running — and build a long-lasting connection to your organization.
Diversity and inclusion aren’t just HR trends. They’re strategic issues.
Studies show that lack of inclusion in the workplace costs U.S. businesses up to $1.05 trillion. Insights highlighting the costs of poor diversity measures are forcing companies to reevaluate existing policies and practices.
Specifically, the COVID-19 global pandemic has shined a light on diversity and inclusion issues affecting frontline workers.
On the flip side, companies that implement diversity and inclusion strategies are reaping benefits such as increased employee engagement, better retention, and more creative problem-solving.
Here’s what you’ll learn
Current state of diversity in the workplace for frontline workers
How a lack of diversity in the workplace affects frontline workers
Business benefits of providing diversity in the workplace
What diversity in the workplace looks like
Obstacles to diversity in the workplace
How to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace
Final thoughts: championing diversity in the workplace for frontline workers
In this post, we’ll discuss the current inclusion challenges facing frontline workers. We’ll also outline how businesses can better promote diversity in the workplace – and how to include it in your internal communications.
Current state of diversity in the workplace for frontline workers
Frontline workers in the United States are employed in the following six industries:
Grocery, convenience, and drugstore
Public transit
Trucking, warehouses, and postal service
Building cleaning services
Health care
Child care and social services
When the U.S. government issued mandated business shutdowns, these essential industries remained open. The frontline workers who keep these businesses running experienced pandemic-related stress and risk of exposure to the COVID-19 virus.
Here’s a quick look at the demographics of the more than 31 million frontline workers in the United States:
64.4% female / 36.6% male
58.8% white
17.0% Black
16.3% Hispanic
6.7% AAPI (Asian American / Pacific Islander)
Although women make up most frontline workers, they’re underrepresented in the public transit (29.1%) and trucking, warehouse, and postal service (22.7%) industries.
How a lack of diversity in the workplace affects frontline workers
Frontline workers are the face of your company, and they provide valuable insights into your customers’ needs and pain points. However, if you don’t prioritize diversity and inclusion in your frontline workforce, you could risk losing many of these high-impact team members.
Here are a few ways lack of inclusion and diversity in the work environment creates a negative experience for frontline workers:
Poor communication
Communication between team members with different native languages or cultures can be challenging. Add to that the fact your frontline employees aren’t necessarily in the office every day; they’re out in the world facing customers.
Without communications systems in place that cater to all of your employees, your frontline workers can feel confused or disconnected from the greater team. In more extreme cases, poor communication channels can lead to conflict between team members.
When companies have a clear majority profile, it’s more likely for an employee who doesn’t “fit the mold” to experience harassment and discrimination. If you don’t have diversity in management positions, it’s harder for employees to speak up about harassment or other negative experiences.
Less incentive to feel engaged at work
Even if frontline employees don’t experience harassment at work, lack of diversity leads to lower employee engagement. A frontline employee who’s different from the workplace majority can experience isolation and feel they’re not seen or heard.
And if your company tends to promote only those who fit the majority, then employees who feel different won’t see room for long-term growth that keeps them engaged.
Ultimately, employees who don’t feel safe or valued in your organization are more likely to leave. Over time, the cost of continually replacing alienated and dissatisfied employees will cost your business.
Business benefits of providing diversity in the workplace
Creating a more diverse place and inclusive culture doesn’t just benefit your frontline employees; it’s a competitive business advantage too.
Here are the top benefits that businesses report after investing in diversity and inclusion programs:
Increased perspectives and creativity
A diverse workforce brings unique perspectives to the table, which increases creativity and problem-solving. According to a Boston Consulting Group study of more than 1,600 companies, teams with diverse leadership drive almost 20% more innovation revenue than their counterparts.
How to champion diversity in the workplace for frontline workers 1
According to the Wall Street Journal, the 20 businesses ranked the highest in diversity and inclusion scores recorded 12% operating profit margins. Companies who ranked low on diversity initiatives, on the other hand, only generated operating profit margins of 8%.
Bringing together people from different backgrounds gives you a broader customer perspective, results in better decision making, and helps you avoid tone-deaf features or marketing campaigns.
Different perspectives in your business help you identify and capitalize on more market opportunities.
Reduced employee turnover
Higher employee engagement remains one of the top benefits of hiring diverse teams — businesses with better employee engagement experience less turnover in their workforce.
What diversity in the workplace looks like
It’s clear that successful workplace diversity and inclusion efforts can give businesses a strategic advantage.
But what exactly does diversity in the workplace look like?
It turns out that diversity is, well, diverse. Business owners and leaders must consider several types of diversity, including:
Cultural background diversity
Religious diversity
Gender identity diversity
Race and ethnicity diversity
Age diversity
Neurodiversity
Disability diversity
Sexual orientation diversity
Modern diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) programs need to go further than race and gender diversity.
Companies also need to think about embracing diversity in all departments and at all levels of their organization. Diversity initiatives are most successful when they include leadership and management.
Obstacles to diversity in the workplace
While the benefits of workplace diversity may seem clear, many companies struggle to implement effective diversity programs.
The primary obstacles businesses face when creating a diverse and inclusive environment are:
Leadership buy-in
Manager training
Lack of awareness
Encouraging honest feedback from employees
How to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace
Expand where you post job notifications
Train leaders and managers
Allow employees to take off cultural and religious holidays
Offer on-site daycare
Extend options for flexible hours
Use an app with on-demand translation
Solicit feedback from your employees
1. Expand where you post job notifications
Fostering a diverse workplace starts with the hiring process. Hiring managers can reach a more diverse talent pool by expanding where they share job openings. Your hiring department can build relationships with outreach groups, community hiring offices and chambers of commerce, and job fairs that cater to minority groups.
2. Train leaders and managers
You can’t assume that your managers know the value of diversity. To successfully implement diversity and inclusion efforts into company culture, both leadership and frontline managers need to buy into the idea of creating diverse teams.
How to champion diversity in the workplace for frontline workers 2
As you make changes in your hiring process, conduct manager training sessions that underscore the benefits of an inclusive workplace. Give them tools to implement your initiatives on their teams.
3. Allow employees to take off cultural and religious holidays
When you hire diverse talent, demonstrate that your company honors and celebrates the various cultural backgrounds and points of view your team brings to the workplace.
One simple way to do that is by letting employees take off work for religious or cultural holidays that aren’t observed by the entire office. By creating a culture that empowers all workers to observe important holidays, you can increase employee engagement and retention.
4. Offer on-site daycare
Many diversity initiatives focus on race and ethnicity, but gender diversity is an equally important facet. Although gender roles are expanding, access to quality childcare presents a significant challenge to working mothers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, 2.9 million women left the workforce between March and September 2021, when schools closed.
According to Care.com, over 60% of parents would be more loyal to their company and have better job performance if they had access to employer-subsidized child care.
Let’s face it: your employees’ lives don’t revolve around their jobs. Many of them want to start families and raise children. If you consider child care a business issue, you can improve retention and job performance.
5. Extend options for flexible hours
If you can’t offer employer-subsidized child care, then consider expanding your flexible work hour options. Telecommuting, remote work, part-time positions, and job sharing help you provide equal opportunity to a more diverse talent pool.
How to champion diversity in the workplace for frontline workers 3
Flexible work hours will grow increasingly important as more baby boomers move into retirement and old age. Minorities rely less on professional care for the elderly. So, many millennials are entering an era where parent care and child care compete with work for their attention.
Offering remote work or even hybrid work models means your diverse employees won’t have to choose between work and parent care. You’ll have a more engaged team that feels seen, heard, and supported.
6. Use an app with on-demand translation
It’s not enough to focus on hiring people from diverse backgrounds; you have to ensure that your workplace culture feels inclusive to everyone. If you create a recruitment process that succeeds in cultivating a diverse workplace, consider using an app with on-demand translation.
How to champion diversity in the workplace for frontline workers 4
Make it possible for everyone at the company to access your internal communications in their native language.
7. Solicit feedback from your employees
Bottom line, fostering diversity and inclusion in the workplace is an ongoing process. You can’t do it all in one fell swoop. To ensure your entire team feels heard, consistently ask for feedback from employees.
That’s helpful when starting, and it lets you measure your success as you roll out changes to company culture. Keep in mind that change doesn’t happen overnight. Diverse employees may not feel comfortable voicing concerns to managers or other leaders in person. So, consider using an internal communications app to let employees submit feedback.
Final thoughts: championing diversity in the workplace for frontline workers
Implementing diversity and inclusion initiatives helps you create a workplace where your employees feel included and empowered. When you have an engaged team of diverse employees, your business performs better. Explore Blink today to learn more about technology solutions that improve engagement and retention for everybody on your team.
Employee retention in healthcare has never been more important — or more difficult. We know that one in five healthcare workers left their jobs in 2023.
Healthcare work is demanding and, at times, emotionally exhausting. Violence against caregivers is on the rise. And with staff shortages a problem in many healthcare settings, stress and burnout are an ongoing concern.
But we need more healthcare staff than ever. The global population is aging, increasing healthcare demand. Staff continuity also improves the patient experience and outcomes. Healthcare providers need to do all they can to hang onto employees.
So what can you do to improve healthcare employee retention? Research shows that nearly one-third of healthcare employees are currently disengaged in their work. This is a worry — but it’s also an opportunity.
Disengagement is linked to high levels of attrition. So increase staff engagement and you reduce staff churn, too. It all starts with listening to, understanding, and acting on the needs of your frontline workers.
Effective employee retention strategies for healthcare providers
Healthcare retention is a challenge. But one that can be met with a combination of employee engagement, communication, and development.
The most effective staff retention strategies in healthcare include the following:
1. Invest in employee development
2. Use technology to improve healthcare worker communication
3. Create an open and inclusive culture
4. Recognize and reward employee efforts
5. Offer competitive wages
6. Make schedules more flexible
7. Give employees a voice and act upon their feedback
Now, let’s take a closer look at these ideas.
1. Invest in employee development
Training, development, and career advancement are key to healthcare staff retention.
The 2024 NSI Nursing Solutions report reveals that career advancement was one of the top reasons for healthcare employees resigning from their jobs in 2024.
And according to Press Ganey, nurses who don’t receive training and development opportunities are 1.4 to 1.5 times more likely to leave their roles than those who do.
Despite the importance of learning and career growth, only 60% of healthcare employees say skill building is offered by their organizations. So, to hang onto employees:
Be transparent about your promotion policies and opportunities
Find out where employees want to go in their careers
Commit to a policy of continuous learning and development
Make training more accessible with mobile learning tech
Beyond those early days of onboarding, offer mentoring and cross-training. Keep employees up-to-date with advancements in healthcare technology and practices.
Note this research from Gallup, which shows that 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined by the manager. Ensure that your managers have the training they need to support employee motivation, engagement, and retention more effectively.
Time is another important factor. Busy healthcare staff on the frontlines of your organization don’t just need training opportunities. They need dedicated time in which to access them.
The takeaway: Invest in ongoing education and training programs suited to your employees’ needs. Also, facilitate learning by giving easy access to learning tech and building training time into employee schedules.
2. Use technology to improve healthcare worker communication
Healthcare organizations tend to use a variety of internal communication channels. These may include a noticeboard, staff pagers, and email.
But there are problems with these methods of communication. First, you can’t be sure that a message has been received and read. And second, these channels don’t inspire two-way communication, a key pillar of employee engagement.
To make internal communication at your healthcare organization more effective and less fragmented, you can create a communication hub using a mobile-first employee app or intranet.
Here, you can share mandatory reads that employees have to click to acknowledge. You can create open channels of communication between healthcare staff and their managers — and give employees easy access to documents and resources that support them in their roles.
You can also segment your workforce by role, department, tenure, and location so they only receive relevant communications. This helps to avoid unnecessary distractions and information overload for time-strapped healthcare workers.
When Elara Caring adopted Blink as their primary communication tool, they were struggling with high staff turnover and low levels of employee engagement. Since adopting Blink, the organization has transformed engagement, with 95% of employees feeling more connected to Elara and each other.
The takeaway: Use an employee app or mobile intranet to make work-life easier for frontline employees. Give workers unified access to internal communications.
Next on our list of employee retention strategies is workplace culture. A positive, inclusive, and supportive culture makes your organization a happier place to be. This leads to better healthcare staff retention.
It also impacts patient outcomes. Because when healthcare staff feel supported and operate in a culture of psychological safety, they can ask questions and raise concerns without fear of repercussions.
To develop this type of culture you need open, two-way communication across the whole of your organization. A digital communication tool can help you achieve this. It allows everyone, including hard-to-reach frontline employees, to share news, ideas, and opinions.
You can create dedicated spaces for 1:1s, group chats, and organization-wide Q&As. This helps employees to feel heard and valued. It also helps them to build meaningful workplace connections.
Wellbeing is also paramount right now. With around half of all physicians and nurses experiencing symptoms of burnout, a positive workplace culture relies on adequate stress management and mental health support.
The takeaway: Take time to analyze your organizational culture and find areas for improvement. Prioritize open, two-way communication to support psychological safety at work. Also, provide stress and mental health support to address the symptoms of burnout.
4. Recognize and reward employee efforts
Gallup shares that when healthcare workers are recognized for their work, they’re four times more likely to be engaged and five times more likely to feel connected to company culture.
Employee appreciation also affects patient safety. Gallup found that employees recognized for good work in the last seven days experienced fewer patient safety incidents.
That said, only 18% of healthcare workers feel that employees are recognized and valued at their organization. That’s below the national average of 22% for US employees and much lower than other sectors — financial services stands at 34% and professional services stands at 28%.
Put simply, healthcare providers need to do more to recognize and reward their employees. The best recognition and rewards programs are tailored to your healthcare workers and their preferences — but here are a few ideas:
Recognition via internal communications: You can publish achievements and recognize hard work publicly, on your communications platform. The rest of your workforce can then see praise and add their congratulations, too.
Direct appreciation: Some workers may prefer to receive praise privately. Direct appreciation from managers is another way to make employees feel seen, heard, and valued.
Appreciation gifts: Incentivize your healthcare team with gift cards, cash prizes, fun experiences, or benefits like extra paid time off. These are great ways to recognize your employees’ hard work and boost morale.
The takeaway: Make employee recognition an integral part of your workplace culture. Learn about employee recognition and reward preferences. Then, ensure managers regularly offer praise for employee effort.
5. Offer competitive wages
Money isn’t everything. But when you’re working a demanding and emotionally draining job, a competitive salary makes it easier to sustain motivation during those tough days.
Offering good salaries shows that you appreciate and value your employees. So keep an eye on what competitors — in and outside of healthcare — are offering. Also, consider polling your employees to learn if pay is one of their primary workplace frustrations.
When deciding what you can afford to pay, bear in mind the cost of losing employees.
According to NSI Nursing Solutions, the average turnover cost for a bedside registered nurse (RN) stands at $56,300. And — when you factor in lost revenue, interview expenses, locum costs, and the inevitable dip in productivity — the cost of losing a physician can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The takeaway: Offer fair compensation. When your workers know they’re fairly paid, they’re more likely to stay working for your organization, which means you retain your best employees and their collective knowledge.
6. Make schedules more flexible
Advances in AI, virtual healthcare, and telemedicine, mean it’s easier than it used to be to support flexible employee schedules. And this is something employees are looking for.
According to O. C. Tanner, 80% of healthcare workers say having flexibility at work would influence their decision to stay at their organization.
So how do you make flexible working a reality for frontline healthcare employees? You can offer:
Staggered hours
Part-time hours and job shares
Fixed or rotating shift patterns, depending on employee preference
Advance warning of shift schedules
You can also give employees more autonomy over where and how they work. Start by finding out what employees want from flexible working. And try to harness the potential of virtual healthcare wherever possible.
Digital tools, like an employee app, are useful here too. They can help you structure and track staff schedules — and give employees the tools they need to swap shifts independently.
The takeaway: Offer flexible scheduling to help your employees achieve work-life balance and keep them working in healthcare. Find out what flexible working means to your employees, then do your best to facilitate it.
7. Give employees a voice and act on their feedback
Keep your finger on the pulse and you prevent employee engagement and retention issues from sneaking up on you. An annual check-in with your healthcare employees is not enough. You need to regularly gather and analyze employee data and feedback.
So look at the analytics provided by any employee communication and engagement software you use. Discover how workers are interacting with the platform and your communications.
Also, run regular surveys to find out what workers think of the employee experience — or any other aspect of your organization and its operations. In doing so, you give employees a voice, which makes them feel valued and respected.
Just bear in mind that employee surveys and polls can damage the employee experience if you fail to act on the feedback your employees provide. In Blink’s survey of frontline health and social care employees, there was one standout message from an employee to senior management:
“Please listen to your staff and follow up on promises. Too many empty promises.”
So use employee feedback wisely. Identify ways you can improve the healthcare worker experience. Create and clearly communicate your plan of action. Then, keep employees in the loop as you progress toward your employee experience goals.
The takeaway: Use analytics and employee feedback to inform healthcare retention strategies. Find out what employees like and dislike about working for your organization. Then keep them in the loop with survey results and your plan of action.
Boosting healthcare employee retention with Blink
Staff retention in healthcare is a challenge. But by implementing these employee retention strategies, you’ll find it easier to hang onto your existing staff — and attract new hires too.
As you implement these workforce retention strategies, keep the needs of your healthcare workers front of mind. Their needs differ from those of desk-based employees.
Healthcare workers spend their days caring for patients, so they have little free time. They don’t sit at a desktop computer — and they’re dealing with high stress and burnout.
So when putting any of these strategies into action, ensure that you make life as easy as possible for your healthcare team. Give them easy, mobile access to the information and resources they need.
A tool like Blink is designed to support employee engagement and internal communication for busy frontline teams.
Blink’s secure employee app is a hub for two-way communication, feedback, and recognition. It gives employees easy access to workplace resources, development opportunities, shift swap tools, and wellbeing support.
Available via smartphone, Blink fits seamlessly into the work day of your frontline employees, improving their employee experience and encouraging them to stay with your organization.
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