The Changing Nature of New Employees’ Orientation: “Staff Retention and Turnover Reduction” An Empirical Study In The Gambia's Public And Private Sectors

Purpose: One of the major areas on HRM is how to develop employees and get the most efficient out of them by retaining employees and reducing an organization's turnover rate. People leave organizations all the times, depending on various reasons that might be personal and out of the control of the employee, and/or either due to conflict of interest of employees seeking a change in their careers. There are various possible factors of the range of control of the organization. However, it has been observed that organizations can keep their employees longer if they are oriented and welltrained. In this paper, investigation will be on the impact of employees' orientation as a tool towards reducing high turnover rates. Methodology: Both primary and secondary data were used to gather information for this investigation. The secondary data was obtained from articles, blogs, papers online, and textbooks. The questionnaires were sent to respondents electronically via Google forms. A link was produced: Https://forms.gle/GEgBCklkmlkMXmL9 after the survey was built, it was shared amongst respondents with an attached letter of clarification explaining the process of participation which was on voluntary basis. The survey was opened for a span of one week and within a week 144 surveys were filled and submitted above the benchmark which targeted 100 participates. The targeted audience was a random selection of The Gambia’s workforce, there was no specific organization under reviewed. Findings: The Statistics of this survey shows that very few numbers of employees stayed with an organization for more than 5 years of employment which indicates a high turnover. Over 73% of the respondents received orientation prior to job engagement with little and/or less information about how to do their jobs. Whereas, over 27% of employees never received any orientation. Results also show that management does not get involved often in ensuring that their newly hired employees understand what-to-do? And how-to-do-their jobs, rather most employees ended up learning their jobs by themselves. Finally, this survey recorded 38% for employees’ feedback and 66% of the time management does not respond to staff feedback. Feedback is one of the most ideal ways of improvement but management concentrates less on it. On the side of training and development, 42% of the respondents believe that orientation helps in reducing the rate at which people leave an organization. While 36% feel neutral about this statement and 50% of the respondents believe that orientation helps in retaining employees. Keywords: Employee Retention, Organization's Turnover Rate, Employment