There is an easy solution and I don't know why so many companies can't understand this. It's simple, pay a fair amount and there will be lower turn over. Every employee should be evaluated every two years so that their salary is at least the market median. And a raise doesn't even have to match what an employee would get from switching jobs. For example, if an employee could get 10k raise by changing jobs, many would stay if given a raise half of that. The reason is, switching jobs is risky. Next job could have a bad boss, bad coworkers, etc. If offered, it would often make sense to stay at a good job and take the 5k instead of going for the 10k with unknown risks.
But instead they just give no raises, or even insult their high performers with a "generous" 3% and cause resentment and lower morale.
Every single survey done on employee satisfaction shows salary coming much further down the scale than other factors, like engaging work, good management, leadership, a feeling of contribution, training and growth, etc.
The best, easiest, most profitable way of reducing turnover is to improve their management and leadership. Once you've reduced turnover the benefits of good training far exceed the costs and you get less turnover and more productive staff as a result. Then you can give them a raise so they appreciate the benefits of being more productive.
I think that depends on if the salary is fair. If it's not fair (below market) then it becomes the overwhelming factor. Above fair, it quickly has diminishing returns and other factors are stronger. Part of good management is recognizing this.
They are far, far from basic requirements for a job. They may be for engineers and highly skilled professionals, but for the majority of workers the only basic requirements are reasonable workplace safety and humane hours - and even those are often in question.
You don't get such numbers by asking people 'what would you prefer' - that would give wrong answers even w/o lying, since many of those things are such where sociologists know that the believed preference (what you think you'd choose) differs from the true preference (what you do choose in reality).
But you get useful results if you (a) ask people how happy they are (even if they exaggerate and understate, the ranking is generally accurate), and (b) ask people if they're getting X in the company, and then measure the correlations (and do a bunch of tricky adjustments for factors that are interrelated).
I.e., you don't ask "is a fair boss important for you? are office conditions important for you?" - but, if for example, on average the people who think they have a fair boss are feeling happier than those who think they have an unfair boss; but those who think that the office conditions really suck are just as [un]happy that those who feel that the office is okay - now, that's useful signal.
I think they might respond assuming that "higher salary" means +15%, which is what you can realistically expect in low-paid jobs, and which, for most people, is not worth dealing with an asshole boss, bad work environment etc.
In tech, on the other hand, it can be $70k for a fullfilling job vs $200k for a boring grind in say finance...
If every employee's salary is at least the market median, the market median will rise until half of the employees have salaries below the median. By definition. You can't have Lake Wobegone in a market.
This is true, but if the market is moving and you are still...its moving further away from you. There has to be a balance there. As an employer, you are trying to reap profit from investing early in the cycle (cheap wages). As an employee, you need to induce re-pricing (either promotion, job offer, or switch-eroo).
Except wages are high right now for technical workers due to the low supply of them, as the market gets flooded with technical workers in the coming years wages in this industry will probably drop.
But instead they just give no raises, or even insult their high performers with a "generous" 3% and cause resentment and lower morale.