A valued employee resigns. The company offers a salary increase, but the employee has already decided to leave. During the exit interview, the reasons become clearer: limited career opportunities, inconsistent management, or a workload that has become difficult to sustain.
For businesses managing employee turnover in Vietnam, this scenario raises an important question: what makes employees stay when competitive pay is already in place?
Salary remains essential. However, retaining employees also requires attention to their everyday working experience and their future within the organization. Understanding these factors helps businesses address the reasons behind resignations before another recruitment cycle begins.
Understanding Employee Turnover in Vietnam
Employee turnover measures the proportion of employees who leave an organization during a defined period. For retention planning, voluntary turnover—employees choosing to resign—is particularly useful to examine.
Talentnet’s published summary of the 2025 Talentnet–Mercer Total Remuneration Survey reported voluntary turnover of 9.8% at local companies and 6.6% at multinational companies in the first half of 2025. These survey figures provide context, rather than a universal benchmark for every employer in Vietnam.
The figures alone do not explain why employees leave. A company’s turnover rate needs to be considered alongside its industry, workforce composition, hiring patterns, and internal working conditions.
An overall rate can also hide concentrated problems. Departures may be clustered among new hires, experienced specialists, or employees reporting to a particular manager. Even relatively few resignations can create disruption when they involve roles that are difficult to replace.
The practical question is therefore broader than “Is our turnover rate high?” Businesses should also ask: who is leaving, when are they leaving, and what could have influenced their decision?
Why Competitive Salaries Are Only Part of Employee Retention
Competitive compensation helps employers attract candidates and maintain a fair employment relationship. Looking beyond salary should never become a reason to overlook inadequate pay.
However, a salary increase does not create a missing career path, resolve unclear responsibilities, or change how a manager treats their team. When these issues continue, higher compensation may leave the original reasons for dissatisfaction unresolved.
Research also points to the importance of development opportunities. In PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025, Vietnam highlights, 75% of respondents considered the opportunity to develop new skills a fundamental part of a good job. The Vietnam findings covered 1,040 respondents. This does not establish why employees resign, but it highlights an expectation employers should consider when designing retention strategies.
A useful retention approach examines compensation together with career development, management quality, recognition, and working conditions.
Four Causes of Employee Turnover Beyond Salary
1. Limited Career Development Opportunities
Employees may enjoy their current work while struggling to see a future with the company. This can happen when promotion criteria are unclear, learning opportunities are limited, or additional responsibilities do not lead to meaningful development.
Consider a specialist who repeatedly takes on more complex assignments but receives no guidance on progressing to a senior role. The employee may begin exploring external opportunities because the next step internally remains uncertain.
What businesses can do: Define realistic career pathways and explain the skills, results, and responsibilities associated with progression. Where management positions are limited, offer specialist pathways, cross-functional assignments, or opportunities to develop deeper expertise.
Career conversations should produce specific next steps. Employees need to understand what they can work toward and what support the company can provide.
2. Inconsistent Line Management
Managers translate company policies into everyday experience. They set priorities, distribute work, provide feedback, and respond when employees encounter difficulties.
Retention problems can develop when expectations change without explanation, feedback arrives only after mistakes, or employees are held accountable for decisions they cannot control.
For a growing business, a useful question is whether newly promoted managers have received enough preparation to lead people. Technical competence alone does not establish clear communication or effective delegation.
What businesses can do: Establish consistent expectations for people management. Support managers in conducting regular one-to-one conversations, setting achievable goals, giving constructive feedback, and resolving disagreements.
HR should also look for recurring patterns across teams. A concentration of resignations under one manager warrants investigation, while recognizing that team structure and role demands may also contribute.
3. Lack of Recognition and Perceived Fairness
Employees need to understand how their contributions are evaluated and how opportunities are allocated.
Frustration can develop when strong performance goes unacknowledged, promotion decisions appear inconsistent, or highly dependable employees continually receive more work without a discussion about their contribution.
Recognition is more credible when it identifies a specific achievement and explains why it matters. General praise has limited value if employees still experience unfair decisions.
What businesses can do: Make performance and promotion criteria clear. Review whether comparable contributions receive consistent treatment, and explain decisions with reference to those criteria.
Managers should acknowledge meaningful contributions throughout the year. Recognition should complement fair compensation and development opportunities.
4. Unsustainable Workloads and Unclear Responsibilities
A demanding period becomes a retention concern when it turns into the normal way of working.
Employees may struggle when every task is urgent, responsibilities overlap, or vacancies repeatedly shift additional work onto the same people. In these situations, dissatisfaction may reflect how work is organized rather than a lack of motivation.
For example, a team that has absorbed several vacant positions may need revised priorities and staffing decisions before another engagement activity.
What businesses can do: Review workloads alongside headcount, deadlines, and role responsibilities. Identify tasks that can be stopped, simplified, reassigned, or supported with additional resources.
Where flexible working is feasible, make expectations clear. Where it is not, predictable schedules and fair workload allocation remain practical areas to improve.
How to Build an Employee Retention Strategy in Vietnam
Identify Where Turnover Creates the Greatest Risk
Start with a consistent definition and reporting period. A basic voluntary turnover calculation is:
Voluntary turnover rate = Voluntary departures during the period ÷ Average headcount during the period × 100
Then examine departures by department, role, tenure, and location. Keep voluntary resignations separate from other departures so that different workforce issues remain visible.
Prioritize patterns with a clear operational impact, such as repeated departures during probation or the loss of experienced employees in business-critical roles.
Combine Workforce Data with Employee Conversations
Exit interviews provide useful information, but they take place after the employee has decided to leave. Add regular check-ins, focused surveys, and stay interviews with current employees. Useful questions include:
- What makes you want to continue working here?
- What makes your work harder than it needs to be?
- Do you understand your development opportunities?
- What change would most improve your working experience?
Explain how feedback will be used and provide appropriate confidentiality. Employees need a credible way to raise concerns without depending entirely on their direct manager.
Match Actions to the Problems Identified
Avoid applying the same solution to every team. If employees cannot see a career path, prioritize development and progression. If workload is the main concern, examine capacity and priorities.
Assign each action an owner, a timeline, and a measure of progress. For example, a department experiencing early departures could review recruitment expectations, clarify onboarding responsibilities, and introduce scheduled check-ins during the first three months.
Employee groups may have different needs, but those needs should be confirmed through feedback rather than assumed from age or seniority.
Review Outcomes and Adjust
Track whether the intervention improves the issue it was designed to address.
Relevant measures may include early-tenure departures, internal moves, completion of development plans, workload feedback, and voluntary turnover in the affected team.
Interpret results in context. A lower turnover rate alone does not establish that employees are more engaged. Combine departure data with evidence about working conditions, performance, and employee feedback.
Strengthening Employee Retention with SotaHR
Reducing avoidable employee turnover starts with understanding the relationship between workforce policies and everyday experience. Businesses need to identify where expectations are breaking down and decide which changes are practical to implement.
SotaHR’s HR consulting services cover organizational development, role alignment, performance and rewards, training, and HR policies. Depending on business needs, support can include both recommendations and implementation.
Explore SotaHR’s HR Consulting services to discuss the workforce issues affecting retention in your organization.
Conclusion
Addressing employee turnover requires a comprehensive approach that goes beyond compensation to meet employees’ evolving needs and expectations. SotaHR stands alongside businesses in tackling these challenges, providing tailored HR solutions that help strengthen employee retention and build a more stable, engaged workforce.
