Employee Retention Starts Yesterday

If your workplace culture stinks, people will leave. If you have an amazing workplace culture, other organizations will try to steal your people. What kind of workplace culture do you have? What type of workplace culture do you want? What do you do?

Employee Retention Starts With a Great Workplace Culture

Build a great workplace culture and start yesterday building the best possible relationships with all your people.

I’ve seen this in action. A company builds an amazing workplace culture. In doing so, they become visible to other organizations who want to be just like them. Hiring those people away does not create a great workplace culture for the hiring organization, but they do not know that. They will pay more to hire your people thinking that solves their culture challenges. So, what do you do?

Build Great Workplace Relationships for Employee Retention

Build great relationships with your people. If you have a great culture, you are probably on that track already. The time to build the culture and the relationships is when times are good. That culture and those relationships will protect you when times are bad. While there is no best time to start building a sustainable, positive workplace culture, do not wait until there are challenges in the market or the economy slows up. Ultimately, the right time to start is today.

Most of the time, people will not want to leave an environment where they feel valued and have built meaningful relationships with peers and bosses. If someone offers them so much money that they just cannot pass it up, support them in their decision. Remember, as an accountable leader you always want what is best for your people. Let them know how much you have enjoyed working with them and having them on the team. Also, let them know that if their situation changes in the future, you would love to talk to them about coming back.

People who have had several jobs will value a great workplace culture. Sometimes a younger person, who has not worked in a toxic environment, will not realize just how good they have it and needs to experience a bad situation to really appreciate what a great one feels like.

As an accountable leader, who truly cares about their people, spend your time building relationships between you and your people. Also, create an environment where your people will develop relationships with each other. This builds a tight-knit, cohesive, high-performance team.

Building this high-performance culture and deep relationships starts yesterday. You should already be working on this. Not only that, but it also continues every day moving forward. What are you doing today to contribute to your relationships and build a stronger workplace culture?