How Do You Keep The People You Can’t Afford To Lose?

7 Levers to Build a Company No One Wants to Leave

You’re not just competing for talent.
You’re competing to keep the people who already know your systems, your clients, and your standards.

Turnover isn’t random. People stay (or leave) based on how they feel about:

The purpose of the organization
Their relationships with leadership and their team
Whether this job is helping them build a better life

That is culture. And culture is not your mission statement. It’s the unwritten norms your leaders reinforce every single day.

Culture: The Real Reason People Stay or Go

Culture is how your employees feel at work:

Do I believe in what we’re doing here?
Do I trust my leaders?
Do I feel respected and seen?
Is this worth my energy, my time, my sacrifice?

Leaders shape those answers every day through four unwritten norms:

1. Communication – Open and Transparent

If people don’t know what’s going on, they will make it up. And what they make up is rarely positive.

You need to:

Share context, not just instructions – help them see the vision
Tell people the “why,” not just the “what” – Why does this organization exist?
Be honest about constraints, mistakes, and hard calls

Open, transparent communication builds trust. Without it, everything else you do is a band-aid.

2. Impact – Everyone Knows How They Matter

If employees can’t see how their work impacts the client, the product, the team, or the company, they disengage.

You need to:

Connect daily work to real outcomes: quality, safety, client experience, profitability, purpose
Call out contributions by name: “Because you did X, Y happened”
Make sure every role, from apprentice to executive, can clearly answer:

“Who am I helping, and how would things suffer if I didn’t do my job well?”

3. Opportunity – A Future They Can See Themselves In

People don’t leave jobs as often as they leave stagnation.

You need to:

Show a realistic path: “Here’s what growth can look like for you over the next 1–3 years”
Invest in skills: training, mentoring, stretch assignments
Have real conversations about career direction and where they see themselves in the future, not just annual review forms

If they can’t see a future with you, they’ll go build it somewhere else…..and they should!

4. Relationships – Real Connection at Every Level

Everyone wants to feel connected, not necessarily best friends, but respected, supported, and known.

You need to:

Encourage connection across all levels and departments
Equip leaders to understand their people’s styles, motivators, and stress points
Teach managers exactly how their behaviors positively and negatively impact individual employees

When relationships are strong, people will push through problems.
When relationships are weak, the smallest frustrations become a reason to leave.

What You’re Really Selling

You are not just selling a paycheck. They can get that anywhere. You are selling:

Trust – “I believe you’ll do right by me.” (Both parties!)
Loyalty – “I’ll ride out the hard seasons with you.” (Both parties!)
Commitment – “I’m in, even when it’s not comfortable.” (Both parties!)
Productivity – “I’ll give you focused effort and high standards.” (Both parties!)
Engagement – “I’ll think, not just comply.” (Both parties!)
Work Ethic – “I’ll show up and follow through because this matters.” (Both parties!)

Those outcomes don’t come from perks.
They come from how you run the business.

Seven of the nine strategies in our full framework impact your ability to Keep Great Employees. When you get these seven right, you build a place people are proud to stay.

The 7 Strategies for Keeping Great Employees

1. Purpose – Give Them Something Worth Sacrificing For

We all want to believe in the work we’re doing. People will sacrifice more, stay longer, and care deeper when the purpose is clear and real.

If you don’t define this, here’s what happens:

Your best employees treat the job as a stepping stone, not a home
Cynicism creeps in: “We just build stuff and make money”
High performers chase meaning somewhere else

What you need to do:

Answer clearly: Why does this organization exist?
Spell out what you are striving to accomplish in the next 3–5 years
Talk about your purpose in hiring, onboarding, staff meetings, and reviews
Highlight stories where employees embodied that purpose

When you consistently broadcast your purpose, the top performers who share that belief will find you, and they’ll stay because it feels like their work actually matters.

2. Leadership Mindset – People Don’t Quit Companies, They Quit Leaders

Everyone wants to feel appreciated and seen. Top performers, especially, will not stay where their effort is ignored or taken for granted.

When leadership mindset is off, you see:

Silent disengagement: “I’ll do enough not to get fired”
Top performers carrying the load and quietly burning out
People staying for the paycheck while mentally checking out

What you need to do:

Train leaders to consistently recognize effort and progress, not just results
Expect managers to coach, not just correct
Hold leaders accountable for turnover, engagement, and development – not just production
Make it normal for leaders to ask: “What do you need from me to do your best work?”
Invest in Leadership Development at all levels in your organization – because leadership is about impact and influence, not direct reports.

Top performers follow good leaders, and they bring their top-performing friends with them.

3. WIIFTE – What’s In It For the Employee?

No one wants to feel like their work is meaningless or transactional. People stay when they feel impact + growth + fairness.

When WIIFTE is unclear, you’ll hear and see:

“It’s just a job.”
Empty sick leave banks
Commitment to hours worked instead of work completed

What you need to do:

Talk explicitly about the impact of each role on the organization, product, and people
Reinforce impact during recruiting, onboarding, and 1:1s
Be honest and concrete about growth: skills, responsibility, pay range, career paths
Clarify what you offer that they can’t easily get elsewhere, mentorship, autonomy, project types, schedule flexibility, ownership opportunities, etc.

If employees don’t see what’s in it for them, now and in the future, they will accept the first offer that gives them a clearer story.

4. Fair, Competitive, Equitable Pay – Remove the Demotivator

Money rarely creates sustained motivation. But unfair or non-competitive pay absolutely destroys it.

When pay is off, you see:

People doing mental math constantly: “I could be making more somewhere else”
Resentment when they discover pay gaps that don’t make sense
Good employees staying just long enough to find a better option

What you need to do:

Make sure your base pay and total rewards are genuinely competitive for your market and roll
Have a company pay philosophy that guides pay decisions, and talk candidly about how you structure pay and why
Create internal equity, pay differences should make sense and be explainable (there should be nothing to hide)
Offer benefits that support a healthy, sustainable life: time off, health & wellness, reasonable schedules
Compensate at a level where pay is no longer a concern, and it stops being a barrier to performance or engagement

You don’t have to be the absolute best-paying company.
You do have to be competitive and clearly fair. Once money is not a sore point, people can fully engage with the work.

5. Outcomes & Expectations – Clarity Beats Guesswork Every Time

People leave because the expectations are unclear, inconsistent, or constantly shifting.

Job descriptions usually list tasks and responsibilities. That’s not enough.
People want to know: What does success look like?

When outcomes and expectations are fuzzy, you get:

Misalignment: “I had no idea that was the priority.”
Frustration: “I keep getting in trouble for things no one told me.”
Early departures: “This isn’t the job I thought I was taking.”

What you need to do:

Define clear, concrete outcomes for the role (30, 60, 90 days and 12 months)
Spell out what “good” looks like — quality, timeliness, communication, decision-making. Instead of “Answer the Phone” it should be “Route the calls to the appropriate person 98% of the time.” “Be friendly and make callers feel welcome, and get a 95% customer satisfaction rating.”
Align expectations between leadership, direct manager, and employee
Re-visit and refine expectations as the role and business evolve

If you want people to stay, they must feel like they’re set up to win, not set up to guess.

6. Job Fit – Put the Right People in the Right Seats

If how someone thinks, learns, and behaves doesn’t align with the job, the hiring manager, or the team, they will either underperform or eventually leave, even if they like you.

Signs of poor job fit:

Great attitude, poor results (or vice versa)
Constant friction with manager or team despite skills
A high performer in one environment crashing in another

What you need to do:

Measure more than skills and experience:
- Thinking & problem-solving
- Behavioral style (pace, detail, assertiveness, structure)
- Interests and motivations
- Emotional Intelligence
Use validated assessments to compare the person to the job, the manager, and the team
Adjust onboarding, coaching, and responsibilities based on what you learn
Have honest conversations when the role and the person simply don’t match

Job fit isn’t about “good” or “bad” people. It’s about alignment.
When someone fits the job, the leader, and the team, they feel like they belong, and that’s when they stay.

7. Integrity & Values – The Non-Negotiable Foundation

If your values and integrity are questionable, employees will leave for a safer environment.
And they should.

When integrity is shaky, you’ll see:

Employees distancing themselves from decisions or leadership
People saying, “That’s just how it is here,” with a shrug
High Turnover for “reasonable reasons – like pay or commute time”
Quiet exits from your most principled, high-performing people

What you need to do:

Be brutally clear about your actual values, what you will and won’t do to win work – and reward those values in action, often
Make decisions that align with those values, even when it costs you something
Protect people who speak up about problems instead of punishing them
Hold everyone to the same standards, especially top performers and executives

This more about values on the website or wall. It’s about living and breathing them. When people trust your integrity, they don’t just stay – they defend the company, recommend it, and bring their whole selves to the work.

So… What Needs to Change in Your Company?

If you’re honest, you probably already know where the cracks are:

Maybe pay is competitive, but growth is unclear.
Maybe you’ve got strong purpose, but expectations are a moving target.
Maybe your leaders are technically excellent but untrained in how to lead humans.

You don’t have to fix everything overnight.
But you do have to start deliberately working these seven levers if you want to keep great employees.

Your Next Step

Here’s the bottom line:

If you strengthen these seven areas, you’ll build trust, loyalty, commitment, productivity, engagement, and work ethic.
If you ignore them, you’ll keep bleeding your best people, and paying the price in lost knowledge, stalled projects, and constant rehiring.

Use this page as your checklist:

Which of the seven is your strongest today?
Which one is clearly costing you people or performance?
What is one concrete action you will take in the next 30 days to improve it?

Our Insp-Hired Culture survey is designed to help you know where to focus your efforts first – to help you find the biggest crack in your foundation.

If you want support designing or implementing a “Keeping Great Employees” strategy around these seven levers, that’s exactly what we help leaders do.

Because once you’ve hired great people, the smartest move you can make is to become the kind of organization they never want to leave.

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