Creating a culture that supports talent retention is essential for building a loyal and dedicated workforce. When employees feel valued, supported, and aligned with the company’s mission and values, they are likelier to stay with the organization long-term. Cultivating such a culture requires intentional efforts with supportive leadership to foster engagement, provide growth opportunities, and ensure a positive work environment. Providing competitive compensation and benefits and offering growth opportunities are fundamental to this cultural approach but are not the only aspects to consider.

A culture that prioritizes retention emphasizes recognition, constructive management, career development, and well-being. Supporting work-life balance to improve employee satisfaction and encouraging employee involvement and empowerment are also crucial. It involves building strong relationships, fostering open communication, and creating a sense of belonging.

Perspectives from Thought Leaders on How to Retain Talent

To explore the critical cultural elements needed to retain talent, we have gathered insights from thought leaders who have effectively cultivated such environments within their organizations. Their experiences and reflections shed light on the cultural foundations that support successful talent retention and employee engagement.

Graham Peelle
Global Operations, People, & Talent Leader at Endeavor Strategic

On the surface, retaining talent looks like a set of core actions, where if you do A, you get the result B, and so on. It can be at times, but it rarely is. Retaining talent is a much deeper organizational-level holistic endeavor, with the culture coming from the top and the execution necessary by the day-to-day front-line managers. Retention doesn’t happen from snacks and parties - those kinds of feel-good, value-add, and culture-building fun things can contribute if they are backed up by the real, hard, and meaningful stuff.

Sometimes, it's more concrete, like pay, benefits, flexibility, appreciation, etc. Other times, it can be more about the firm’s vision, the work being done, and the people’s connection to that work - the “Does my job make a difference” kind of work. If a connection with colleagues is lacking, there is poor meaning, and the work doesn’t give the associated energy, none of the extras matter. So, what does this mean? It means retaining talent is a function of a strong organizational culture.

If you want to build, foster, and grow a strong culture to help retain talent, it’s critical for you as a leader to go deeper than the surface level to find the answers, and that’s where you find the magic for your company. Retention comes from a few core areas for you and your leadership to continuously review, monitor, and address as necessary:

• People: The quality of your character, performance, talent, and effort. Without people, everything else is just talk because people guide everything. Your train only moves with the right combination of talent assembled to drive forward and deliver on your promises.
  
  
• Process: Your process shows how organized you are to position your people and the work to get the job done. Common sense, simplicity, ease of communication, knowledge capture, storage and access, enabling procedures, mapping, process flows, and quick reference material make your people more efficient, profitable, and successful.
  
  
• Technology: Tech is what powers your people and process, so don’t get those reversed, as tech is not something to fit in or build around in many cases, but it is what helps you get your work done. Tech enables efficiency, effectiveness, and quality. It makes profitability possible in some industries. Use tech to empower and enable the best for your people by making their jobs more fun, more meaningful, and a power that fuels your culture.
  
  
• Business: How’s your market? Do you have a real purpose for your clients and potential clients, or are you filling the hole in a commoditized world until someone steals your lunch? None of this matters if your work doesn’t land in a zone where you can build, scale, and continue to sell your product or service. Stay close to your market to use your blossoming culture and people to sell your unique value in a market eager for solutions and results.
  
  

Remember, retention is not an initiative, project, or focus area; it’s your organization's future, as it often shows the culture and purpose of your work and people. Retention results from all you do, showing the public, including your clients and prospective clients or talent, what you are really made of. Retention allows you to capitalize on your market with full power, with talent and culture at the core of your business, driving ownership and accountability to provide the best service and products for your clients.

Jonathan Mills
Founder & Strategist at Corporate Culture Specialist

The odds are stacked against retention. The median US tenure is about four years. The speed of transient employment has increased over time rather than stabilized. Employee power has increased. Career advancement often requires job-hopping. This leads me to believe that turnover will be high for a long time, and our perspective on retention needs a prescient update. Here are some good ways to reorient:

1. Don’t fight attrition; incorporate it. Reorient your focus from retention to long-term relations. Regard employees as “on a journey” through your organization. You are a place of personal and professional growth and production, but then employees need to move on. Therefore, policies and practices must sustain your relationship into the post-employment future. You do that by serving an employee’s larger career goals. For example, a) Learning and Development (L&D) programs can intentionally prepare employees for future jobs, and b) you can use job-crafting to let employees explore their interests.
   
   
2. Build non-fungible benefits. Non-pay benefits like good coworkers, fair processes, and a sense of purpose disproportionately affect employee satisfaction (environment is more impactful than pay). That’s not an excuse to underpay, but it does elevate the value of culture. That means you must treat corporate culture and quality of experience initiatives as equal partners to your compensation plan. It sets you apart as an employer and boosts retention. I recommend getting a copy of Show Me the Amenity by Jason Sockin.
   
   
3. Rescue management. The manager's job is a burnout shop. It drains empathy, creativity, and energy from good people and turns them into “bad managers.” We need to reduce the load by narrowing their job description. Then, out-of-scope responsibility should be redistributed down and out. That results in employee empowerment, a flatter structure, and more reasonable job requirements. If you can expand this philosophy to rescue other overburdened roles, you’ll be supporting the workforce in a very powerful way.
   
   
   

Other Articles in the Series on How to Retain Talent

Understanding the critical cultural elements is just one aspect of this process. Equally important are the lessons learned in retaining talent and the impactful advice for leaders and managers to guide their teams through these changes successfully. Together, these perspectives can give organizations and professionals a comprehensive view of what it takes to retain talent successfully.

Enabling Practices and Resources

Advanced Career Development Practices that Create a Culture of Mobility and Expand Employee Career Horizons with Technology.

Advanced Career Development creates and manages a culture of career mobility by building a structured foundation for comparing jobs with overlapping capability requirements.

Creating a Culture of Internal Mobility that Supports Employee Development and Retention.

Creating a culture of mobility requires management to accept that the benefits of movement (promotions and transfers) far outweigh the costs of replacing workers in their teams.

Defining Career Lattices to Define Robust Lateral and Vertical Mobility.

The ability to enable the movement of employees proactively and strategically from role to role at the leadership, professional, and operational levels is a key flexibility that advanced career development functions offer.