The relationship between effective employee benefit packages and employee retention is clearly defined: it’s nearly impossible to improve the latter without paying for the former.

If your workforce doesn’t like your employee wellness benefit program, they’re four times more likely to leave your company for greener pastures. While most execs aren’t thinking much about employee retention at the moment, they should be. Two out of three employees are quietly job hunting right now, according to a recent salary.com survey.

There’s a staggering financial impact associated with having ineffective employee retention plans.

• The average 100-employee professional firm burns between $3M and $4.5M on turnover costs every year.
• On average, an $80,000/yr salaried employee costs $240,000 to replace – costs that arise from job advertising, interviewing, vetting, onboarding, training, and periods of low productivity while the new employee learns the ropes.
• This turnover cost cycle occurs every 2.4 years, on average.

The potential turnover cost savings are on an equal scale.

• Convincing one $75,000/yr employee to remain on staff for ten years can save over $675,000 in turnover costs.
• Reducing turnover by just 20% can save the average IT firm over $875,000 every year.
• Finding employee retention techniques that keep just one more $90,000 per-year salaried employee on staff this year will save over a quarter of a million dollars.

So how do you implement best practices for employee retention without breaking the bank? It’s not that difficult to do, but your human resources employee benefits folks have to put in a little sweat equity, and the executive suite has to invest a bit of money, to realize the savings. Your employee wellness benefit programs have to be well thought-out, valuable, perceived positively, and given far more than just lip service.

The key is to leverage the power of perceived value in your employee benefit package. Wellness travel in general, and Vacation Wellness in particular, provide an inexpensive and extremely high-return employee retention tool because of their high perceived value. Employees have literally jumped up and down with excitement at Vacation Wellness rollouts – certainly a compelling phenomenon when you’re considering how to bolster your employee retention plans.

You have a lot of choices among employee retention wellness programs. Wellness vacation programs, and wellness travel in general, are highly lucrative, low-cost additions to your employee benefit plan.