How to Create a Culture that Keeps Top Talent

If you’re having trouble attracting and retaining top talent, the key may lie in your corporate culture. In order to hire and hold on to talented employees, you have to know where your culture currently stands and where it needs to be.

A growth company culture attracts top talent through strong company branding, drives high performance through meaningful manager-employee relationships, and creates valuable brand ambassadors long after employees have left your organization. A growth culture can also lead employees to choose to spend their career with your organization because your organization provides them the best opportunity to develop and continually improve their wellbeing. As a result, creating a growth culture should be a strategic priority for every organization. 

As demonstrated in a recent study by Harvard Business Review,  culture is easy to sense but hard to measure, in part because the workhorses of culture research—employee surveys and questionnaires—are often unreliable.

This study found that (1) cultural fit is important, but what predicts success most is the rate at which employees adapt to organizational culture changes over time, (2) cognitive diversity helps teams during ideation but hinders execution, and (3) the best cultures encourage diversity to drive innovation but are anchored by shared core beliefs.

Leading organizational culture and leadership development company Envision-U has determined that creating a growth culture is essential for employee retention and engagement. Through cultural and employee assessments, you can gather anonymous opinions across your entire workforce on all the moving parts that affect your culture. These opinions illustrate your current culture and can be used to create a map for establishing the “growth culture” your employees believe would make them happiest and most productive. 

Following are three key factors to consider when creating your growth culture. 

A Strong Foundation

When it comes to attracting and retaining top talent, it’s important to remember that your people are your foundation, your identity, and your brand. It is essential to understand how they view your company and what influences their success on the job.

In many organizations, people do not always feel comfortable opening up to colleagues in the same way they would with someone from outside the company. Anonymous assessments can facilitate more honest feedback on current beliefs, assumptions, behaviors, and what really motivates and discourages your employees. The results of these assessments can provide you with a set of foundational principles that drives the individual and group pride your employees need to do great work.

A Clear, Concise Mission

Many companies confuse their mission with their vision. Your vision is the desired future outcome for your company, while your mission is the reason for being in business, the meaningful path your company is pursuing. Google, a company with a leading growth culture, says its mission is “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

By creating a truly compelling mission and aligning everyone to that path, you can energize your employees with a feeling of being part of something bigger than themselves. Not only will a clear, concise mission inspire your entire organization and increase employee retention, but it’ll also help communicate the important role your company plays to the rest of the business world.

Defined Company Values

Company values demonstrate which behaviors are rewarded and recognized within your organization. They communicate to employees how they can be most successful in their roles, which is an important element of a growth culture. Assessments can help identify the values that are important to your employees and the attributes they bring to the company. These insights can help you take the steps to ensure that individual values align with organizational values.

It is vital to ensure that your values are clearly defined, concise, memorable, and easy to grasp for the entire workforce. When every employee is driven by a clear and concise set of values, attracting and retaining top talent becomes significantly easier.

Salespeople are a very important part of any company’s culture. They are the lifeblood of the organization. Once you’ve attracted top salespeople it’s not enough to just look at their past sales accomplishments. You also need to understand if they are a culture fit. Can they live by the values of the organization? A top salesperson who lives outside of the company values may bring short-term revenue gains but long term, they can be cancer to your growth culture. 

By establishing a strong foundation, promoting desired behaviors, defining your company values, refocusing your leadership, and identifying a clear, concise mission, attracting and retaining top talent becomes much, much easier. 

To learn more about finding the right seller style for your organization visit https://www.nasp.com/seller-style/