A Comparison of Manufacturing Industries in the South East and their use of exit interviews as a tool in gathering information to formulate retention strategies.

Retention is defined in the Oxford dictionary as “the capacity for holding or keeping something”. Productive employees are considered valuable assets in an organisation and when time and energy has been invested in finding, training and developing them and they are, in turn, positively impacting the bottom line, it is important those employees remain in the organisation. Employee turnover is an issue with significant bottom-line impact. Organisations have recognised that their employees are their most vital assets and are, therefore, investing in them to ensure they are motivated, productive, and capable of being developed to meet future challenges. The objective of this project is to examine some of the reasons employees leave organisations, what strategies can be put in place to help retain them and how effective those strategies are in practice. This particular research was undertaken to compare the existing theory to twenty-first century practice and effectiveness in industry and to see if the general theories on why employees leave an organisation are still found in industry