3 strategies to boost employee loyalty & create a winning culture

It’s hard to find good staff, and as the global war for talent gets hotter, it’ll get even harder.  The cost of hiring the wrong person, particularly in a senior role, is huge. Some say a ‘mis-hire’ costs 200 percent of a salary.  You won’t want to get that wrong too often.

As an accreditation and business improvement specialist, I’ve had the good fortune to see up close how the CEOs of top companies recruit and retain top team members, build a high-performance culture, and get more from their team than ever before.  I also had my team of seventy employees, and I went on to achieve a $20 million valuation and then a successful sale of my business, so I know how challenging it is to find great people and build a winning culture.  

Here are three strategies you can use to create a loyal team and build a culture that makes you an employer of choice:

1. Strong onboarding processes:
   A recent survey from the Society of Human Resources Management stated, ‘69% of employees are more likely to stay for three years if they experienced great onboarding.’   To facilitate this important process, we built a staff intranet to facilitate our staff induction process, and it was money well spent.  This microsite contained a host of links, documents, videos, manuals, and guidelines that showed the new employee who we were, what we stood for, and how we operated. It was easy to navigate, simple to update and streamline a range of business processes, which makes onboarding at scale much easier.  It also created a consistent approach so that everyone got given the same information at the same time, which meant there was no excuse for people to say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that was how it was meant to be done.’ It was all there.

   Some businesses have a series of manuals that do the same thing as an intranet, but having it all online and structured in a modular fashion and optimised for mobile phone access, made it easy for even the newest employee to find the information they needed.

2. Create cultural values:
   Many companies pay lip service to the concept of corporate values. They put a mission statement on the wall, and never look at it again.  That’s not how we operated. We had three core principles and they were at the centre of everything we did:
   – Empathy
   – Curiosity 
   – Friendliness
   If we exhibited these values, we knew we could not go wrong. Of course, values were irrelevant if we didn’t stipulate the behaviours that underpinned them.  Here’s the top 10 behaviours we asked our team to demonstrate.  We communicated these behaviours in our induction process so that there was no ambiguity about what we believed in and expected to see:

   – Be on time
   – Have a good work ethic
   – Make an effort
   – Project good body language
   – Be energetic
   – Have a good attitude
   – Be passionate
   – Be coachable
   – Do extra
   – Be prepared

3. Offer more than money:
   Despite popular opinion, it’s not just a large pay packet, flexible conditions and time off to attend a ‘save the climate’ rally that makes an employee loyal.   It’s much more than that.  There are certain job factors that lead to job satisfaction, while others create job dissatisfaction.  In short, there are ‘motivating factors’ (job satisfiers) and there are ‘hygiene factors’ (job dissatisfiers).  To be an employer of choice, you need to be aware that both play a role in creating a happy team member:

Hygiene Factors (Job Dissatisfiers) Vs Motivating Factors (Job Satisfiers)

Company policy           Achievement
Supervision           Recognition
Working conditions           Work itself
Interpersonal relationships at work           Responsibility
Salary and benefits           Advancement
Job security           Growth

Getting the Hygiene factors right will prevent dissatisfaction but they won’t offer motivation, create satisfaction and they certainly won’t make staff stay.   You’ve got to address all these factors. 

It’s going to get harder to find good staff so take the time now to step back and create the cultural plan so that when it comes time to hire at scale, you have the foundations already in place and can grow faster and stronger than ever before.

Written by Kobi Simmat.

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