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Prioritizing your people is key to retaining them. But organizations often overlook the people-first concept by focusing on infrastructure and other non-people-centric endeavors crucial to the business. Unfortunately, this also means they’ve likely forgotten the people that make their businesses thrive. When an organization focuses on people-centric strategies that positively impact their staff in a holistic way — addressing emotional, physical, mental, and financial health — employees are invariably more loyal to that organization.

While many people appreciate more money or new benefits, there is much more to retaining employees. People want to work for entities that provide the following opportunities:

• To leverage their expertise and do what they do best.

• To develop their skills and advance professionally.

• To have their opinions heard.

• To feel psychologically safe in the organization. Amy C. Edmondson, the Novartis professor of leadership at the Harvard Business School, defines psychological safety in the workplace as a safe space for people to speak up, make mistakes, and bring their full selves to work.

• A total rewards package (including compensation, benefits, well-being effectiveness, development, and recognition) that matters to them.

• To work as part of an organization that makes them feel like they are a part of something greater than themselves. Does the industry resonate with the employee?

• To be valued.

Add that all up, and you’re talking company culture.

Organizations need to be intentional in developing, implementing, and maintaining their culture and their total rewards, connecting all of it to the vital secret ingredient: their people.

Cultivate Your Culture

Culture is not static. It needs tending and nurturing and takes intention to be cultivated correctly. Create meaningful connections and understand how your employees experience your workplace culture. Listen and learn from the diverse perspectives of your employees. What they do for your organization matters, and your people have the best insight into what helps them effectively get their job done and what doesn’t. Look to them to help create the most efficient and effective changes.

Ensure your employees know what is expected of them. Communicate clearly what is and is not acceptable, not just in their job responsibilities, policies, and procedures, but also in how they treat others internally and externally. At the end of the day, your people should clearly know they will be treated consistently using the same criteria.

Encourage and reward innovation and risk-taking. Generating ideas isn’t a problem. Squashing ideas is. Organizations are occasionally so focused on profits and losses that they forget the payoff that could result from one or many of those ideas. Offer simple ways for your people to bring ideas forward. Innovators tend to consider breaking rules, challenging conventions and assumptions, and breaking down barriers. Taking risks is good!

Innovation isn’t limited to product development, so encourage all your people to innovate. That way, they will create more effective, efficient, and engaged workplace cultures.

A Balancing Act

Owners, managers, and human resources professionals need to lead the creation of workplace cultures and total rewards while fostering genuine connection.

How do you intentionally create a total rewards philosophy and program that connects your people to your organization? Ask. If you’ve provided a psychologically safe environment, your people will tell you what they want and need. And, if you haven’t provided a psychologically safe environment, your people will tell you in another way, often by leaving to join a competitor that better meets their wants and needs.

Balancing your people’s needs and wants with affordability may be challenging, but it’s important to make the effort because turnover is expensive, entailing recruitment costs and lost productivity and knowledge. Studies have found that turnover costs fluctuate by position. For example, replacing an exempt technical/professional employee may cost an organization 150% of the departing worker’s annual salary. The cost is typically less than that for hourly employees and more for executives.

In today’s economic environment, employees may march into your office demanding a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), a salary increase, or both. In these situations, you need to decide whether any of those options are the right answer for your organization. Recent Employers Council articles cover important considerations about COLAs and other pay increases and suggestions for resources and services to help with the economics of recruiting and retaining employees.

Your people may ask for other things, including flexible work arrangements, physical and mental wellness memberships, financial seminars, student loan repayment programs, and tuition/education reimbursements. Weigh not only the financial return on investment but the benefit of having engaged employees who stay with your organization because you’ve created and maintained a culture and total rewards package that they value.

Be intentional in developing, curating, and maintaining your culture and marrying it with your total rewards. Employees know when you are a truly people-centric organization versus one that only pays lip service to the culture and total rewards they need and want. Don’t just talk the talk, walk the walk.

If you have any questions, email the Employers Council Member Experience team.