By Graham Templeton – BOOST ADP

Workplace culture is one of the most powerful factors affecting employee retention — and that’s great news for managers and HR professionals.

According to “Fixing the Talent Management Disconnect,” a new research study conducted by the ADP Research Institute^®, positively influencing retention requires a detailed understanding of that workforce’s most pressing frustrations and anxieties. ADP found that these sorts of cultural problems are one of the top reasons employees decide to voluntarily leave their jobs — more than a quarter of respondents said culture was a major motivation for leaving or wanting to leave their job.

Workplace Culture Begins at Onboarding

As Micah Solomon recently pointed out in Forbes, the earliest hours of onboarding are “vulnerable hours,” where the employee will absorb whatever culture you present. “Use this opportunity to get employees to latch onto their purpose in your company rather than dragging them down with the minutiae and technical details that tend to dominate company onboarding procedures.”

Workplace culture isn’t a list of policies but a set of interacting employee traits and behaviors — traits that can be selected while finding talent and fostered when bringing new hires on board. Make sure that employees understand not only management’s overarching goals but also their own role in helping the company to achieve those goals.

When workers grasp this, they bring that understanding with them as they move further into the company. An organization can thus foster long-term trends without having to enforce those trends in the long term. And the fewer strict rules an organization has to enforce, the happier its workforce will tend to be.

Happy Workers Are a Necessary (but Not Sufficient) Precursor to Culture

An organization with high employee morale doesn’t necessarily have a strong culture — consider the case of gleefully corrupt corporations — but an organization with low morale definitely does have a bad one. “The issue of morale is more nuanced than most employers realize,” writes ADP. “They fail to perceive a distinction between emotions that are intrinsic to an employee (such as loyalty and confidence) and those that result from the employer’s behavior (such as feeling valued and recognized).”

Crucially, though, employees generally do know the difference — and they don’t tend to give their employer credit for feelings of happiness that they don’t believe are due to their employer’s intentional actions. Happy employees, in other words, aren’t necessarily satisfied employees.

As Solomon notes, for instance, Hyatt Hotels found that their employee orientation read like a litany of threats or, as one new employee put it: “A Hundred Ways You Can Get Fired by Hyatt.” The company found that fixing its persistent turnover problems required it to welcome employees with a more positive message — and to support this message with new, ongoing policies on issues like benefits and scheduling.

Employee Recognition Is the Easiest Path to Employee Retention

“Fixing the Talent Management Disconnect” reveals a rather incredible statistic about job opportunities: “Employees say they are more likely to hear about job opportunities at other companies (40 percent) than at their own company (30 percent).” This can have a devastating effect on retention, since the employees most likely to rankle at being passed over (and who look most attractive to outside firms) are often your best and hardest working employees.

Further, ADP found that the majority of workers feel confident and loyal overall but that a minority say they feel valued and recognized in their job. Making sure that employees know they’re at least being considered for promotion opportunities means that in many cases it isn’t even necessary to give them to job to satisfy the desire for recognition. For many, it’s enough just to know that their work led them to be seriously considered.

The Very Real ROI of Strong Company Culture

Gallup once calculated the cost of low employee engagement at about half a trillion dollars across the entire U.S. economy, but the issue is less about losses due to a bad culture than about gains due to a good one. As was recently pointed out in Forbes, “when a culture goes bad, it’s not because something went wrong in the business. It works the opposite way. Something unfortunate happened in the business because the energy went south.”

Culture can thus be either devastating or empowering depending on how it’s constructed — but in either case, it’s of the utmost importance. Employees must be shown that their day-to-day performance really does contribute to their future success. A workforce that understands this won’t need to be managed into having a loyal company culture. It will simply be loyal. And that’s what HR should be striving to achieve in virtually every case.