Building a Firm Culture that Attracts and Keeps the Right People on Your Team
Building the best team means keeping the best team members.
Turnover is expensive and time-consuming—the average new hire costs a company over $4,000 and takes 42 days to fully onboard, not to mention the extended learning period that can often take a year or more.
Making the right hire can save you time and money. But once they’ve joined your team, how can you increase the chance that they’ll stick around?
Let’s take a look at how you can go beyond salary alone to keep your team happy—and create a workplace that fosters loyalty in your team.
Build an Attractive Culture
The most important element of keeping your team happy—even more important than high salaries—is building a culture that is both healthy and transparent.
How can you tell if you have built the right kind of culture?
Ask yourself this question: What happens when someone on your team makes a mistake? Are they afraid to admit it, or do they come to you immediately to tell you what happened?
The answer will tell you if you have the right kind of culture or not.
The right culture begins and ends with a company’s leader(s). Are you a living example of the kind of openness that you want to foster in your team? Don’t underestimate the impact your attitude can have on your team.
In writing, authors are always told “show, don’t tell,” meaning you can’t just tell people that a character is nice, you have to have that character actually be nice to prove it.
Are you showing your team the way you want them to act, or are you just telling them how they should be? In other words, do you practice what you preach?
Encourage Your Team to Take Ownership
Taking ownership doesn’t have to mean a path to partnership (although it certainly can).
More realistically for everyone in your company, it means allowing them to own their area and have real responsibility.
Advisor-owners can struggle to delegate tasks and make the necessary hires, often feeling it’s faster and “easier” if they just do it themselves. As a result, even after hiring someone for a job, they often hold onto control of the area the new person is expected to oversee.
No one likes having the boss constantly looking over their shoulder. If you build the right hiring process, then you should be able to trust the process and trust your people to do what you hired them to do.
One note: If your firm does not offer a path to partnership (and even if you do), you can also increase ownership by providing your team with clear career paths so they know what is coming down the pike.
Trust Your Team Enough to Let Them Work from Home (at Least Sometimes)
Part of trusting your team is giving them flexibility.
Chances are you let them go to doctor’s appointments and pick up their kids when they need to, while still trusting that they’ll get their work done.
If you trust them to run errands throughout the day, then it’s probably not much of a stretch to give your team the option of a hybrid work environment. Maybe it’s one day a week from home, maybe it’s more—whatever you choose, giving that flexibility goes a long way toward telling your team that you trust them.
Of Course, Traditional Benefits are Pretty Important, Too
In the modern age, it’s easy to get focused on everything you can offer your team and forget what you should be giving them.
We said earlier that culture is more important than salary, and that is very true, but the reality is that anyone on your team will have a very hard time turning down a job that offers more money and better benefits—no matter how much they like working for you.
Check industry averages to make sure your salary and benefits are competitive enough. But don’t settle for the status quo. Be generous.
In the end, if you take care of your team, they’ll take care of you.
With the right combination of all these elements, you can build a firm that attracts the right people and keeps them from leaving too soon.