This month’s blog and newsletter topic is “restoring personnel integrity.” This means retaining the right kind of personnel that will continue moving your company to success, and restoring relationships with personnel so that they’re retained.

So often when it comes to personnel, all you hear about is salary and benefits packages. But there is another significant factor when it comes to hiring and retaining personnel, which we’ll explore in this and successive articles this month. And just what is that component?

The Missing Factor

The missing factor is culture. What precisely does that mean?

We all have experienced working in jobs where we were underappreciated or not appreciated at all, despite our excellent work. How did that make you feel? You certainly didn’t want to remain with that company if a better opportunity presented itself. And usually, when it did, you were gone.

What we mean by culture is the cultivation of an environment of making people know they are appreciated for a job well done. Believe it or not, it’s a top priority for people in the kind of employer they want. Obviously money is important, but almost more important is being appreciated, a feeling that they’re genuinely valued for doing a good job. It’s actually something that is missing in many work environments.

The Extreme Example

A notable and unfortunate example of this lack of acknowledgment has recently come to light, with the massive layoffs in the technology sector—Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Zoom being the leaders in this trend.

Certainly, there were people laid off who weren’t valuable to the company and were underproductive or unproductive.

But many others were laid off who were valuable to the company. Being valuable, they were well-paid—meaning they were appreciated. During the pandemic, companies retained them because they obtained government subsidies to cover their payrolls. But when the pandemic ended and the government funding was no longer on offer, companies could no longer afford to hang onto these people and laid them off.

This led to a hiring practice that was even more detrimental to the company—a practice that we’ll cover more in-depth in the articles this month. But these layoffs were an extreme example of underappreciation and doing away with the company culture in which good work is valued and acknowledged.

Want to Keep People?

The bottom line is that personnel retention has every bit as much to do with company culture as it does with salaries and benefits packages.

Certainly people want to be rewarded for a job well done—that’s all part of a career. It’s what a prospective employee looks for when checking out various potential jobs. But it cannot be just a matter of pay and benefits, as it becomes increasingly difficult for someone to desire to remain at a job which, despite the fact it pays well, is thankless.

Want to retain personnel? Want to make sure they stick with you through the lean times and the good? Treat them well. Appreciate them for the job that they do. They’ll be far less likely to have a wandering eye regarding employment.

To learn more, sign up at SELLability.com.