A broad range of strategies are being employed by businesses today in order to try to retain staff, including ensuring employees understand the company’s core values and goals, training top performers for leadership positions and developing competitive reward programmes. Despite these efforts, experience has shown that loyalty and high levels of retention are enjoyed by companies that offer more than merely monetary compulsion to stay.

Your Company Culture

The other critical aspect of business in ensuring staff retention, is culture. All organisations have a culture, whether purposefully designed or not. Historically termed ‘the way we do things around here,’ and more recently referred to as ‘who we are and what we stand for.” Culture is usually developed in response to leadership or the lack thereof, and if not proactively developed it will emerge on its own. It will be shaped by the organisational structure, the behaviour of senior executives, communication styles, approach to control and authority, value systems of leaders, personalities within the organisation, policies, procedures and how conflict is handled, just to name a few. But no matter what shaped it, culture contributes to the health of an organisation and can be a major ingredient responsible for retaining or driving staff away; attracting the cream of the talent crop and getting the most out of the human capital of your company.

Due to the myriad of possible factors that can contribute to the formation of an organisational culture, it is hardly surprising then that a culture might develop that is disjointed, political and downright unpleasant to work in. Historically this has been the case in a number of businesses and it is this stagnating environment that will drive away potential young talent.

In stark contrast, organisations that, from the outset, work hard at clearly defining their organisational purpose and values, or how they choose to behave, and then build these values into the operations of the organisation, soon reap the benefits of a vibrant cohesive culture and ‘the way we do things around here’ is highly attractive and sustainable. Leaders in great organisations work hard at sustaining their culture, because they appreciate the market advantage that this culture creates for them. They cherish and nurture it, understanding what stimulates its sustainability, and that it attracts the most talented, like-minded individuals to it.

Overall, it is clear that staff retention and succession planning can no longer remain the exclusive domain of HR professionals, but must be driven by decisive action from top business leaders within organisations in order to ensure the type of leadership and culture that will attract and retain young talent.

• Add New

Comments (0)

Write comment

Name:

Email: do not notifynotify

Website:

Title:

Message:

Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.