Losing staff has to be one of the biggest costs to many businesses.
We’ve seen reports estimating the average total recruitment costs for professional positions at nearly one year’s annual salary.
The costs of staff turnover aren’t just the advertising, recruiter fee and interview costs. There’s the waste from lost output, both directly from reduced employee counts (at least temporarily) and indirectly due to the hours leaders and managers have to commit to recruitment. Plus there is the additional training costs for the new recruit.
It’s inevitable staff will leave, but how do you extend the productive tenure of staff?
You don’t follow some unsubstantiated “high-performance” framework. Rather, you take advantage of what science has investigated and found to work.
The critical scientific research we’ve read tells us it comes down to building a thriving high trust, high purpose culture.
High trust cultures are motivated to get to the best decisions and have thriving, safe conflicts (or in other words, debates). Furthermore, they have team members who truly work as a team and trust one another to get the requisite work done.
High purpose cultures have team members positively motivated to achieve the big audacious mission – the “purpose” of your business. To help whoever it is your customers are, with whatever painful problem it is your business is driven to resolve for them.
Building a high trust, high purpose culture demands leadership who have set out a clear, motivating strategy. Who live by winning values. Who continuously communicate consistent messaging and overcome the false dichotomy of high standards and being good to people.
So, what is your gut telling you right now? Do you have a thriving high trust, high purpose culture or do these insights perhaps make you feel a bit guilty for falling short?
Don’t feel shame about this. A great many of us have been there. That’s just the journey of business. To learn what is best and continue to get better.
If you want to increase productivity, reduce staff turnover and generally have a happier workforce, don’t feel shame for not being your best now, actually do something about it.
In that video you just watched, we mentioned some research.
If you’d like the references, simply head on in to the Munro’s Business Academy and you can find them on the Reference page.