In this guide, we share hands-on guidance and tactical perspectives to help leaders achieve a real, long-term improvement in employee retention. Our goal is to give you actionable steps to keep your top performers and to maintain their motivation and productivity for years ahead. We examine how to foster a strong, supportive remote work culture and which localised benefits help prevent competitors from poaching your people. We also set out the guiding principles behind successful, sustainable remote teams:
Keeping people — and putting in place programmes to track and bolster that retention — is essential if you want your business to expand and prosper. With remote work now widespread, many organisations are finding it difficult to identify what truly sets them apart and, as a result, what makes them the best place for current and future employees.
Employee turnover has increased by 8.7% since 2019.
Maintaining a strong retention rate delivers:
And, ultimately, a massive boost to your bottom line. Creating an organisation with strong retention also means being resilient in any market and able to grow whatever the economic conditions. When talented people choose to work with you, there’s little you can’t achieve.
Frequently asked questions
How is your staff retention rate worked out?
You must first establish your current retention rate before you can improve it.
Pick the period you want to measure — for example the last year or the previous quarter. Then identify two figures:
Employees on the payroll at the start of the period
Employees remaining at the end of the period (excluding any new hires)
Next, use this calculation to determine your staff retention rate:
For example, if you began a quarter with 162 employees and finished with 170 — including 20 new hires — the calculation would be:
((170-20) ÷ 162) × 100 = 92.56%
You should subtract any new hires so your retention figure isn’t overstated. For instance, if you have 100 employees and add five without any departures over three months, a raw calculation would show 105% retention — removing new hires gives you a truer result.
Over longer periods some people may join and leave within the timeframe you’re measuring. In those cases, calculate a separate new‑hire retention rate using the number of new hires and the number who remain. So, if you hire 20 people in three months and one leaves, the new‑hire calculation would be:
((20-1) ÷ 20) × 100 = 95%
Typically, a retention rate above 90% is seen as strong. For new hires alone, aim for 95% or higher, since you would generally expect recent recruits to stay for at least a few months.
Roles with the greatest turnover include Product (36.4%), Information Technology (36%), and Engineering (35.2%).
Tactic to improve employee retention:
Calculate retention separately for in‑office and remote teams. If the results differ, it could indicate that remote staff feel less supported than their office‑based colleagues.
Why do top performers choose to leave?
Remember that turnover differs by sector: retail, tech and media, professional services, entertainment, and accommodation have lower-than-average employee retention rates. Therefore, if your company operates in these areas, an ideal retention rate may be slightly below the global benchmark.
If your retention figures aren’t where you want them, you’ll probably want to know why people are leaving.
McKinsey’s 2022 Great Attrition, Great Attraction Survey 2.0 offers useful findings. According to the survey, the top reasons employees give for leaving are:
Limited opportunities for career development and progression
Insufficient overall compensation
Leaders who are uncaring or uninspiring
A lack of meaningful work
Unsustainable expectations around workload
Colleagues who are unreliable or unsupportive
Limited flexibility at work
Poor health and wellbeing support and a non-inclusive, unwelcoming workplace community
Addressing these problems within your organisation is crucial to enjoy the advantages of strong remote retention. With these causes in mind, let’s look at the most effective ways to improve retention in your business.
How equitable global compensation affects staff retention
Employees are more likely to stay if they feel valued and treated fairly. Both evidence and common sense indicate that offering equitable compensation is one of the simplest steps to take.
Why equitable compensation matters
When employees believe their pay is fair for their skills and relative to colleagues’ remuneration, they generally feel happier and more motivated.
Fair pay is fundamentally one of the cornerstones of retention in any organisation. A clear equitable compensation approach builds trust and confidence, which encourages employees to perform well and stay with the company.
Paying your team appropriately is essential, but working out the numbers can be tricky. To ensure you’re on the right track, read our guide to remote worker compensation.
Creating a fair compensation package for your employees
When defining a fair compensation package, look beyond an employee’s skills and seniority. If your people are spread across different countries, extra variables need to be considered. Assess these country-specific factors:
Mandatory benefits provided by the employer
Cost of living (and its impact on salary expectations)
Compulsory salary deductions
Employee expectations regarding salary and benefits
Taking all of these elements into account will help you create a total rewards policy — essentially a compensation package that balances fairness and clear value. Your total rewards policy covers the bonuses, benefits, and additional incentives you provide to employees.
Keep in mind that fair compensation is a powerful tool.
Today’s professionals expect to influence their organisation’s success and to see tangible returns. The most effective compensation approaches are forward-looking, aligning employee outcomes with company performance. Bob has observed that pay must extend beyond a market-rate salary to become a genuine competitive advantage. A progressive compensation framework can be summarised into six key components — salary, bonuses, pension and equity — alongside equally important “professional” benefits and “lifestyle” benefits. Crafting the right combination can be complex, so rely on modern HR tech tools to validate how chosen strategies affect candidates, team members and leadership.
Annie Rosencrans, U.S. People & Culture Director @ HiBob
When your compensation strategy meets employee needs, you’ll boost motivation and encourage long-term commitment to your company.
How to build a benefits programme that keeps top global talent
Organisations that let staff work remotely experience lower turnover than companies that require office-only attendance. Remote’s research estimated that gap would widen to 4.4% in 2023.
If you want to attract and retain a global team, you must provide a locally tailored, globally competitive benefits plan.
It’s tempting to fall into a ‘one size fits all’ approach — offering the same benefits package everywhere — but that rarely meets people’s needs. Benefits should be designed around local requirements and cultural differences wherever possible. Not only does this help you attract top talent, strong benefits programmes are essential for keeping them.
Joana Viana, Senior Global Benefits Design & Strategy Expert
To customise benefits packages and compete with local employers who know the local workforce inside and out, you need deep local insight.
Let’s consider an example:
In the UK
Offering a medical plan with maternity cover to staff in the UK is unlikely to impress — they already have access to free healthcare, including maternity services, via the National Health Service (NHS).
In Singapore
Offering a medical plan with maternity cover to employees in Singapore, however, is much more likely to influence their view of an employer. In Singapore, maternity healthcare can cost thousands of dollars, so anyone thinking about starting a family would feel reassured to have this type of cover included in their benefits.
Local insight is invaluable when it comes to benefits, but collecting that information yourself can be complex and time-consuming. That’s why we created the Global Benefits Report. This resource helps businesses quickly compare preferred benefits across countries and regions.
Would you like some extra help with your global benefits strategy?
At Remote, we connect businesses with local benefits experts so you know exactly which benefits are legally required and which are optional. We also provide curated benefits plans for every country worldwide, saving companies the time and cost of doing the legwork themselves.
"Remote helped us build loyalty with employees by providing world-class benefits and the rights that come with being employed locally."
Heather Miki, People Operations Manager @ kWh Analytics
"We wanted to quickly grow our Mexico presence without navigating the intricacies of incorporation, payroll, and benefits management ourselves. Remote allowed us to do exactly that."
Greg Kefer, CMO @ Lifelink Systems
Create a remote-first culture to manage global teams effectively
Remote-first companies aren’t only for remote workers. It might sound odd, but by adopting remote-first practices you create a fairer working experience for everyone, regardless of where they are based. Leaning into documentation, asynchronous work practices, and a culture that values results over hours benefits everyone. Here’s how to create a remote-first environment of your own.
How to reduce employee turnover with a strong talent retention strategy
What do we mean by remote-first?
Remote-first means treating remote work as the default. Whether employees are based at your HQ or have never set foot in your office, their experience of working for your company should be the same.
Remote-first culture | In a genuinely remote-first culture, all elements of the employee experience — from manager support and team bonding to progression opportunities and workplace tools — are accessible to every member of your team, no matter where they are located. |
Building a culture isn’t only about what happens outside work; it’s also about how the work gets done. We’ve produced a guide on building a supportive remote culture to walk you through the steps. What needs to change to go remote-first? What needs to change to go remote-first?
Many team leaders know that shifting from an office-based model to remote-first isn’t without challenges. If you try to recreate an office environment in a remote setting, you’ll only achieve partial success.
Colleagues can’t just pop over to a desk for a project update or chat on the way to the car park. Missing those everyday interactions can leave remote staff feeling disconnected, overworked, and ineffective. This is sometimes made worse by the common — and avoidable — mistakes new remote managers make:
Common remote leadership mistakes to avoid
If you don’t communicate frequently and in public channels, staff may feel cut off from the group’s wider goals.
If you don’t respect employee downtime and contact people who are off the clock, your team risks burnout.
If you fail to model a healthy work–life balance, employees may feel pressured to work long hours and suffer the consequences.
Micromanaging — constantly checking in or relying on time trackers to reassure yourself that the team is on task — will drive good people away.
If you don’t use communication tools properly — for example, sending direct messages instead of posting in public channels — messages will get mixed and people will feel excluded.
Such mistakes damage the employee experience and weaken the impact of your employee retention programmes.
Regular staff surveys and exit interviews help senior leaders assess — and, where necessary, improve — overall job satisfaction. That, in turn, reduces turnover.
The problem with micromanagement
Micromanagement is a common issue in remote work. Many employers feel uneasy about handing over autonomy over the working day to their people.
Because of this, some organisations have installed tracking tools on team members’ computers to monitor productivity. The result, however, is that experienced employees don’t feel trusted.
This can cause resentment and erode mutual respect. It also encourages key employees to meet the bare minimum level of productivity required.
So what should managers in remote-first settings be doing differently?
Assess employees on their productivity and effectiveness, not by the number of hours they work.
Now that it’s clear what a remote-first culture is not, which core practices should leaders put in place to make remote working a success?
Deliberate communication about progress, performance and recognition is essential.
A way for team members to stay productive and connected, regardless of time zone or time of day.
Every team member helps build a documentation culture in which key information is recorded, logged and shared with the whole team.
Channels for non-work chat help teams get to know one another better.
A closer look at asynchronous work Asynchronous work describes a way of working where team members do not need to be online at the same time. Async working is central to a high-performing remote team. It lets people complete tasks efficiently — with access to the resources they need — regardless of when they sign in. That flexibility supports a healthier work–life balance and the perks of flexible hours. Asynchronous working is also a practical retention lever for employers. Employees value flexibility, trust and empathy. A culture that embraces asynchronous working signals that your organisation offers those three things, which can help improve retention. Unsure whether asynchronous working suits your business? Read this guide to async work from Remote COO and CTO Marcelo Lebre.
How supportive remote-first management helps retain staff
Cultural change only happens when forward-thinking managers are prepared to accept a new normal. A remote-first culture relies on managers who actively support that approach. What does supportive remote-first management look like? Strong remote-first managers blend respect and trust with clear expectations for accountability. They care less about when people are online and more about being available for essential meetings and meeting customer needs. They do not mind which hours staff choose to work, but they do expect documentation to be kept current and updates to be shared with the right groups on a regular basis. They use 1:1 meetings to build connection, gather employee feedback and nurture culture, rather than simply ticking off to-do lists.
Remote-first organisations do not mean removing responsibility. If anything, people who work remotely often need to be even more accountable than colleagues in offices. When you hire great people and trust them from day one, they will repay that trust with excellent work delivered at pace.
Job van der Voort, CEO of Remote
Being an effective remote-first manager is not about following a fixed set of rules. It is about saying, "I trust you," and seeing that trust returned when team members meet their goals and publish clear, public updates about their work.
Effective employee retention strategies for every business
With the workplace changing, focusing on strong retention strategies is vital. Whether your team is remote, on-site or hybrid, keeping talent is central to a healthy culture and strong engagement.
These retention tactics can help you achieve that.
1. Foster career development
Providing clear career paths and opportunities for growth is key to retaining staff. Mentoring and regular reviews also raise job satisfaction. Promote these benefits during hiring to attract top candidates more easily.
Opportunities for progression combined with recognition programmes strengthen loyalty by showing employees they have real prospects within your organisation.
2. Create meaningful work
Satisfaction comes from meaningful tasks. Involving staff in projects that match their interests and align with company goals increases the likelihood they’ll stay. Learn about their interests during onboarding.
When employees see their work making a real impact, it improves the experience and builds a more inclusive culture — one where staff feel essential to the company’s success.
3. Set realistic work expectations
Balanced workloads are crucial for morale and avoiding burnout. Offering flexible options and realistic goals supports work-life balance. Encouraging holidays and supplying adequate resources also help.
Respecting employees’ personal lives improves wellbeing and engagement. Fair expectations lead to higher involvement and effectiveness, which boosts retention and reduces turnover.
4. Cultivate a supportive team environment
Fostering a supportive atmosphere with team-building and open communication strengthens culture and lifts morale and engagement.
Such an environment bolsters employee loyalty and satisfaction. When staff feel included and valued, they’re likelier to stay, reducing turnover and creating a united team.
5. Prioritise health and well-being
Supporting physical and mental health should form part of your retention approach. Wellness initiatives and remote options show you care about employee wellbeing. These measures help staff balance work and life, producing happier, more engaged people and lower turnover.
In short, these retention strategies are important for building a positive culture and keeping employees on board.
Why remote-first management is so powerful
Employees now value flexibility above almost everything else. In the Remote Global Benefits Report, workers worldwide rated flexibility as more important than many other benefits, even four-day weeks and retirement plans.
What does that mean for managers of remote teams?
Today’s employees want workplaces that fit around their lives, not the other way round. They still want to do great work, but won’t put their lives on hold to do so.
Prioritise diversity, equity, and inclusion to keep employees connected
Employees increasingly want to work in diverse, equitable and inclusive organisations. Remote-first setups can accelerate better DEI practices.
How a more diverse and inclusive culture benefits retention rates
DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is a strong multiplier for retention. Embedding DEI in your culture gives you:
How to develop a diverse, equitable, and inclusive global workforce
Building a diverse, equitable and inclusive global workforce takes sustained commitment.
Create a remote DEI committee to help you understand challenges and opportunities.
Ask your team for honest feedback on DEI performance.
Draft a formal DEI policy and update it regularly with input from the whole team.
Embed DEI into recruitment by using inclusive hiring practices.
Support inclusion for underrepresented groups, including women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ, and neurodivergent employees
Want to become a globally inclusive employer? Catch our webinar: Building a globally inclusive recruitment strategy.
5 pillars to motivate and retain a high-performing remote team
When a team is motivated and effective, people enjoy logging on each day. Leaders should maintain motivation and performance across a global team, nurturing the employee experience from hire to onboarding and beyond.
Intelligent recruitment
Start well by using value-driven, remote-first recruitment practices.
Communicate clearly and transparently
Adapt interviews to accommodate candidate time zones
Share what a remote-first culture looks like for employees
These steps help you hire people who match your values, integrate with the team and know what to expect.
Seamless communication
Great communication and employee experience go together. To improve communication, follow our communication guidelines for remote teams:
Prevent notification burnout. Encourage staff to switch off notifications when they need focused time.
Make updates transparent and searchable. Record meetings and progress, then store those documents publicly so everyone can access them.
Establish communication norms. Make sure staff know the best ways to communicate across the platforms you use.
Never sacrifice 1-1s. Get to know employees and give them space to raise concerns with regular one-to-one meetings.
Comprehensive onboarding
Onboarding is a key lever for retaining remote workers.
Employee turnover can be as high as 50% in the first 18 months. To avoid this, the ideal remote onboarding program includes:
Engaging, self-serve resources
Assigned onboarding buddies
Introduction to company values and culture
Guidance on company communication norms
Expectations and targets for the first weeks
Regular manager check-ins
Clear progression opportunities and communicated career paths are the most effective way to improve retention —63% — even more than pay rises!
Smart meetings
Meetings can be highly disruptive. Too many reduce productivity and often add little value. Poor formats leave staff frustrated and disengaged.
What can you do? You may need to rethink meetings for a remote-first organisation. Try these tips:
Create an agenda, then cancel the meeting if it can be handled async
Set shorter time limits to keep meetings focused
Rotate essential calls to accommodate different time zones
Allow people who aren’t contributing to leave early
Schedule bonding and social facetime so work meetings can be shorter and less frequent
Run remote meetings with these tips in mind, and they’ll become useful forums for communication rather than a drain on your team’s time.
Supportive management
Without face-to-face time, spotting signs of stress and burnout is harder. Managers of remote teams must be alert to how quickly burnout can spread and work proactively to prevent it.
That might involve:
Keeping track of employee workloads
Setting realistic deadlines
Allowing time for non-work team activities
Encouraging staff to take breaks and use annual leave
Model good work-life balance so staff don’t feel pressured to skip breaks
Support employees to avoid burnout and they’ll be both more productive and likelier to stay longer with your organisation.
How flexible work practices can help you retain top global talent
Employees value flexibility, remote work, async hours and freedom. Operating with a remote-first mindset gives staff these perks while boosting productivity, responsiveness and accountability.
Flexible working: a top priority for remote workers
Flexible working — the freedom to choose where, how and when you work — is a major consideration for many employees.
Remote’s Global Benefits Report found flexibility matters to everyone, especially women and younger workers. Women often juggle more family responsibilities, making flexibility essential. Younger people are more mobile, so flexibility helps them shape the life they want while growing with your organisation.
Our Global Benefits Report highlighted the importance of flexible conditions for remote and distributed teams.
This insight should influence both recruitment and pay strategy.
Proactively consider how to stop your top performers from hunting for other roles. Find out what they value most and act to improve retention, showing care and loyalty to your people.
Offering clearer promotion paths, performance-based pay rises and more flexible work options to keep top talent is almost always cheaper and faster than losing key staff and recruiting replacements.
Flexible work is top priority for 29% of employees
But flexibility isn’t only for a few people: it benefits everyone.
More flexible organisations adapt better to tough times and seize opportunities quicker. How can you offer the flexibility employees need? For many, flexible working is decisive when choosing where to work. Overall, 29% of employees list it as a top factor, with higher rates in certain groups: Contractors 38% — their top consideration; Gen Z 35% — their third; Women 32% — their fourth.
Offer work conditions that top talent is seeking
Sixty-nine percent of employers believe they offer flexible working, yet only 47% of employees say they receive it.
There’s a gap between the flexibility employers think they provide and what employees experience. Leaders may define flexibility differently, or senior leaders might receive a different level of flexibility than typical staff. This disconnect fuels dissatisfaction and higher turnover. The result can be frustrated employers whose investments in flexibility aren’t recognised.
Hidden retention benefits of offering autonomy
Autonomy and trust are major drivers of happiness at work. How do you build a culture around them?
It’s about transparency, clear communication and genuine support. That mix creates psychological safety so employees feel confident and able to do their best work.
How to improve your flexible working benefits
Flexible working shouldn’t mean sacrificing team cohesion or career progression. If remote workers get flexibility while others receive raises and promotions, remote staff will feel penalised and may look elsewhere.
In comparison, 45% of on-site employees see telecommuting as a top perk (almost as important as private medical insurance and paid leave). The lesson for global employers is clear: if top talent is satisfied with flexible conditions, they’re often satisfied with the broader benefits package.
So, how can your company stand out as a go-to destination for both flexibility and productivity?
Remote, for instance, makes its entire company handbook publicly available.
Walk the walk
Leaders should be open about taking annual leave and using “nonlinear workdays” so staff feel encouraged to do the same.
Judge results and not hours
At review time, base grades on performance, not hours spent online.
Lean into public channels and documentation
No one is too senior to document work, meetings and plans!
Set a minimum annual leave instead of a maximum
Unlimited leave can carry stigma; setting a minimum encourages staff to take more leave and avoid burnout.
The cost-saving benefit of a flexible working offer
Beyond being a top perk, flexible working can also give you more leeway when designing global compensation packages.
Remote workers value telecommuting highly — nearly as much as core benefits like private medical cover and paid holidays. If their remote-work needs are met, they’re more likely to be satisfied with the overall package.
Rhiannon Payne, Remote Work Advocate
For many remote staff, remote work is the perk they value most, making them less demanding about other elements of compensation.
Only 36% of remote employees list benefits and perks among their top considerations when assessing a job. By comparison, 45% of on-site workers rank telecommuting as a top perk (nearly as important as private medical insurance and paid leave). In comparison, 45% of on-site employees see telecommuting as a top-tier essential perk (ranking almost as important as core benefits like health insurance and paid holidays).
The takeout for global employers is clear. As long as top global talent are happy with an employer’s flexible work conditions, they tend to be satisfied with their overall benefits and perks package.
Hear experts discuss managing a global benefits plan in Remote’s on-demand global benefits webinar.
You should trust your employees from day one. If you can’t, why hire them? Offering trust early and measuring outcomes instead of hours creates a great environment for most people from the start and lets you spot anyone abusing the freedom quickly.
Job van der Voort, CEO of Remote
How to foster transparency and trust for remote and global teams
Remote teams perform best when everyone knows what’s happening. The best way to build cohesion is through transparency before, during and after work is done.
Create clear project outlines and set expectations
If someone wants the latest on a project, they should be able to consult public documentation. Performance data should also be accessible.
Let employees design their workdays
Some are night owls, others start early. Some work in focused bursts. As long as everyone documents and communicates, different rhythms can coexist.
Record, write, and inform
Keep everyone up to date across time zones by recording meetings and posting regular updates in public spaces like open Slack channels. Tag people often and promote a culture where staff can catch up when it suits them rather than being tethered to notifications.
Communicate in public forums
Communication should be transparent, searchable and accessible. Rather than DMing, post in a public Slack channel or Notion page and tag the person. That way anyone who wants to follow the project can do so easily.
Build connections by using face time to bond
Don’t use valuable live time for work that can be done async. Reserve 1:1s and team time for sharing problems, feedback and social bonding. Keep the heavy lifting in documentation so people can collaborate without needing to be online together.
Demonstrate respect
Respect time zones, preferred hours and remote work feedback. Be open to improvements. Responsive leaders make all team members feel able to give their best while keeping a strong life-work balance.
Start implementing these retention tactics to keep star performers
Retaining remote talent today is challenging, but we hope this guide has given you actionable steps to take.
With this guide at your hands, you now know:
Why remote staff retention is important
How to calculate your staff retention rate
What makes a remote employee want to stay at your company
Actionable tactics to improve retention for your remote workforce
The tips in this guide will help you, but there’s always more to learn! If you’re hiring globally, you can always contact Remote to make it easy to onboard, pay, and manage your remote workforce. We can also help you prepare and structure competitive offers in new locations so your global compensation remains effective and compliant.