Definition
The proportion of target employees who remain in the organization during a given period out of the initial or comparable employee group, used to observe the organization's ability to retain key talent; the higher the value, the better.
In detail
Employee retention rate and voluntary turnover rate move in opposite directions and cannot be used as aliases for the same term. Retention rate focuses on those who stay, while voluntary turnover rate focuses on those who leave voluntarily; the denominators, statistical windows, and excluded populations of both must first be unified before conversion or comparison is possible. The CVD definition in DBS often directly tracks voluntary turnover rate, so when the page references 'employee retention,' it should clarify whether it describes a management goal or uses a formal metric.
Example in practice
The company wants to assess the stability of key engineers. Using employees on staff at the beginning of the year and belonging to the target group as the baseline, those still on staff at year-end are counted for retention rate; the same-period voluntary turnover rate is calculated using the number of voluntary leavers and the month-end headcount basis. Management will not directly treat '90% retention rate' as '10% voluntary turnover rate' unless the periods, denominators, and exclusion rules of both are fully consistent.