8 Ways to Improve Employee Retention

Figuring out how to improve employee retention usually starts with the obvious levers: competitive pay and career development. And yes, those issues matter. But many retention opportunities are tied to manager relationships, organizational friction, career advancement, and workload.

For HR and people leaders, the opportunity is broader than traditional HR programs. Some of the strongest retention gains sit in areas traditionally outside HR’s direct focus, such as how employees book trips and file expenses. Eight specific actions in particular can reduce turnover by improving the operational issues.

Why Most Retention Strategies Miss What Employees Value

Most retention strategies fall short because they overemphasize what leaders assume matters and underweigh the daily work experience. In practice, that often means focusing too heavily on pay while overlooking factors like colleague relationships, job security, and how easy it is to get work done.

This mismatch shows up in multiple dimensions:

• HR teams may overweigh compensation relative to what employees see as their main concern.
• Colleague relationships and job security often carry more retention weight than leaders assume.

These issues help explain why companies with generous compensation packages still see employees leave. Positive daily experiences at work often shape whether employees want to stay and how engaged they feel. Those experiences include management quality and the repeated interactions with internal systems that either work smoothly or create unnecessary frustration.

The travel and expense (T&E) workflow is one of the clearest examples. T&E touches employees during high-pressure moments, like catching a flight or fronting money for a work dinner. After the trip, time spent filling out an expense report also sends a signal about how much the company values employee time.

8 Ways to Improve Employee Retention

The most effective retention strategies address daily obstacles at the source, before they accumulate into disengagement. Operational areas — particularly the processes employees repeat weekly — offer the clearest opportunities for measurable improvement.

The eight practices below cluster around three retention levers: removing friction from daily T&E processes, giving employees autonomy within clear guardrails, and showing that feedback drives visible change.

1. Eliminate Expense Report Friction

Cutting manual steps out of expense reporting is one of the most direct ways to reduce daily friction for employees. Many employees front work-related costs themselves. Some decide the reclaim process is so time-consuming that they simply absorb smaller costs rather than file for reimbursement.

The State of Corporate Travel and Expense 2026, a report from Skift and Navan, found that 71% of the business travelers surveyed spend more than 30 minutes on each expense report. That time adds up across an organization and signals to employees that administrative burden is an accepted cost of working there.

Capturing data automatically at the point of transaction can change this dynamic. Navan Expense can capture more than 130 data elements automatically at the point of swipe, including merchant, location, department, cost center, and GL code. The result is fewer hours spent chasing receipts and coding expenses, as well as faster reimbursements, which may reduce the financial pressure on your traveling employees.

2. Make Corporate Travel Booking as Easy as Personal Booking

Matching the speed and simplicity of the consumer experience is one of the most effective ways to keep employees inside the corporate travel program. Trip experience can influence overall job satisfaction, especially for younger employees. When business bookings take significantly longer than personal bookings, employees feel the contrast.

A practical consequence is off-platform booking. In the Skift and Navan report, 80% of the business travelers surveyed reported booking outside their company’s designated tool at least some of the time, often because consumer alternatives offer a better experience.

Closing that experience difference on the corporate side is what helps makes adoption stick. A Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study commissioned by Navan and based on a composite organization found that travelers using Navan Travel saved 70% of the time previously spent per booking. Navan customers see booking times of around 7 minutes, compared with more than 45 minutes on legacy tools, as well as adoption rates above 90%. When the corporate tool is genuinely faster and easier than the consumer alternative, compliance is more likely to follow.

3. Design T&E Policies Around Guardrails, Not Gates

Policies that set clear guardrails around safety and budget, while leaving room for employees to choose within those boundaries, tend to support compliance better than rigid approval gates. Travel policies built around multiple approval layers and unrealistic spending caps rarely reduce costs. They often drive employees to book outside the system, which can limit both cost visibility and policy compliance.

In practice, structured bands work well: firm caps for safety and budget thresholds, with flexibility within those limits. A hotel cap that adjusts by market and season gives employees a more workable path than a flat $200-per-night cap for a peak-season trip to New York.

Shortening the approval chain deserves the same attention. When routine in-policy bookings move through the booking workflow without extra review, and only exceptions require human approval, your employees don’t spend time waiting for sign-off and can focus on their actual work. Co-designing corporate travel policies with input from frequent travelers also tends to improve buy-in.

4. Invest in Duty of Care Beyond the Minimum

Duty of care works best when employees can count on support during travel disruption. Traveler safety is also a core priority for travel programs.

Delivering on that promise depends on knowing where employees are, which is harder when they book outside company tools. Many travel managers don’t have a complete view of where their traveling employees are.

Navan offers several duty of care capabilities that depend on high platform adoption, such as:

• A live map with all traveling employees in real time, including their flights, where they’re staying, and one-click calling.
• A Travel Impact Dashboard for strikes, weather, and disruptions with affected traveler count.

With most of your workforce booking on-platform, duty of care can shift from aspirational to operational.

5. Reward Cost-Conscious Travel Choices With Simpler Program Design

Making the lower-cost choice the easier one is more effective than asking employees to work through complex policy rules for the same outcome. Most corporate travel policies focus on policy exceptions and overlook the opportunity to help employees make lower-cost choices. When employees encounter friction, delays, or unclear rules, the travel program can start to feel punitive rather than supportive.

Simpler program design flips that dynamic. When booking is fast, inventory is broad, and policy rules are clear inside the booking flow, employees are more likely to stay within company systems and make practical decisions without extra oversight. As a result, compliance feels less like enforcement and more like a byproduct of a better experience.

6. Consolidate T&E Tools Onto a Single Platform

Bringing booking, expenses, and corporate cards into one system can reduce the daily switching costs that quietly erode employee experience. Enterprises often rely on a sprawling number of applications, and haphazard tool accumulation can add digital load and anxiety that directly affects employee well-being.

Separate booking and expense tools force employees to switch between them and reconcile data manually. A unified workflow, however, can combine booking, automatic expense capture, inline policy controls during search, spend controls at the point of swipe, and payment processing. Navan does just that, by bringing travel booking and expense management onto one platform, so employees can move between the two without re-entering data or switching tools.

7. Formalize Bleisure Travel Policies

Formalizing bleisure travel policies gives employees more clarity and helps your company manage cost separation and visibility. Employees who travel for work may already extend trips for personal time, whether or not their company has a bleisure policy.

That informal behavior is also where the retention signal sits, and it may be especially strong for younger workers. Blended travel flexibility can factor into employer choice for some employees. Formalizing a bleisure policy with clear cost-separation rules, where personal extension days are at the employee’s expense, can capture this satisfaction benefit at near-zero organizational cost.

On the company side, formalizing the policy also closes a visibility loop: Extended trips show up in the system, which gives the company a better view of travel patterns and related liability questions.

8. Close the Feedback Loop With Visible Action

Employee feedback only helps with retention when leaders visibly act on it. When leaders collect input but don’t respond, employees may see less value in sharing concerns in the future.

To follow through, HR leaders need to connect employee experience data to operational decisions. If an annual engagement survey reveals frustration with expense processes or travel tools, the response should be traceable: a specific change, communicated back to the people who raised the concern.

Investments that close the loop on those concerns also tend to show up in operational data. The Forrester TEI study highlighted measurable gains in ROI, time savings, and efficiency for organizations using Navan. That kind of outcome happens when feedback leads to a visible investment in better tools. Employees can see the difference in how they work each day.

Retention Is Built in the Details Your Employees Experience Every Day

The eight practices above share a common thread: They treat operational experience as a retention investment. Improving employee retention comes from the cumulative effect of every process, tool, and interaction your people encounter during their work.

Your T&E program touches employees during some of their highest-pressure moments. When those moments run smoothly, they can reinforce a message that the organization values people’s time and well-being. Every clear, consistent workflow reinforces that message in the day-to-day experience.

Start by auditing the places where your current T&E processes create the most extra work, including time spent on expense reports per employee, booking complexity, off-platform booking rates, and reimbursement turnaround time.

Then prioritize the changes that affect the largest number of employees most frequently. Small operational improvements, repeated across hundreds of trips and thousands of transactions, build the kind of daily experience that makes people want to stay.