Governance and Employee Retention: An Industry Risk and Outlook During Pandemic

This paper focused on the assessment of governance risks and its effects to employee retention of service-based businesses in Laguna, Philippines. The study exclusively adopted the governance risks from LaConte’s Strategic Risks Model and Job Embeddedness’ Theory for employee retention. Descriptive research and purposive sampling were employed with 360 retrieved questionnaires. The questionnaire used in this study were subjected to reliability testing with acceptable to good internal consistency. Data were evaluated using statistical tools of frequency, rank, mean, weighted mean and ANOVA. The highest governance risks experienced by business owners during the pandemic in relation to planning is the suspended implementation of goals and objectives while in terms of monitoring and control, unpreparedness on future risks was ranked first. Management support to the professional needs of its employees is significant for reduced turnover of employee retention. Moreover, for the employee productivity, involvement of the employees to the business planning got the highest mean. Planning, and monitoring and control have strong significant difference when grouped according to service sector while under employee retention, reduced turnover is significantly different when grouped according to profile factor. However, the employee productivity showed only strong significant difference in service sector. The study suggested that LGUs may develop a program for governance management and employee empowerment program to aid the recovery programs for service-based businesses.