How Company Culture Affects the Level of Employee Turnover

How committed your employees are to your organization and helping it to achieve its goals can be directly linked to the workplace culture that your company provides.

When you have high levels of staff turnover your company loses on many fronts. You lose your best talent to your competition. Levels of corporate knowledge are depleted. Relationships with internal and external stakeholders are fractured. And you have to also bear the costs associated with recruitment every time you replace a staff member.

There is mounting evidence to show that companies that perform well financially are also rated favorably by their employees when it comes to the company’s culture and ethos. In fact a recent report by Breathe HR found that one third of British employees quit their jobs because of a poor workplace culture.

That report also found that poor workplace culture costs the UK economy £23.6 billion (US $30 billion) every year. And that’s just one country!

Companies that experience a high staff turnover quite often have a poor workplace culture at its heart. If you can’t fix the culture, you will have a cycle that’s doomed to keep repeating itself – your best talent will inevitably leave and go work somewhere else.

A poor company culture includes:

1. Poor internal communication

Employees who feel as though they don’t know what is expected of them and who don’t understand what the organization’s goals are are less likely to be engaged and perform well compared to those who do.

If your company isn’t communicating well – whether it’s management talking to staff, staff talking to management, teams talking to other teams or peers talking to peers – you have a problem. Consider implementing an internal communications strategy and overhauling the channels you use, for example, deploying DeskAlerts, to keep your employees in the loop.

2. Bad managers

Unfortunately many managers have no leadership skills and poor people skills. They are promoted to management positions because of their expertise in their field, but that doesn’t automatically make them a good people manager.

Examples of bad managers include micromanaging, overloading people with too much work, not valuing the contribution of skilled professionals, failing to recognize good work, cronyism, bullying, harassment and not giving advice and directions when employees really need it.

3. Office gossip

Humans do enjoy gossiping about one another – and in any context, especially in the workplace, it is negative, damaging and downright toxic.

People who have been the subject of office gossip feel hurt by it and lose trust and respect for their peers.

4. Lack of flexibility

These days employees crave work/life balance, and offering flexible working conditions is seen as a great way to attract top employees.

Unfortunately many companies promise the earth… on paper. But when it comes to implementing these flexible policies it can be up to the discretion of an inflexible manager. Or the policies are only ever lip-service in the first place.

Flexibility should also not be an excuse to overload employees with more work than they could possibly ever fit in their working week with the expectation they’ll finish it in their own time at home later on.