Workplace Culture and Employee Turnover: How to Identify and Address the Real Causes

When an organisation has a high employee turnover rate, salary is often one of the first explanations considered.

Pay matters, of course. But employees don’t make decisions about whether to stay with an organisation based on salary alone.

Their everyday experience of work matters too.

Relationships with managers, recognition, workload, career opportunities, communication, trust in senior leadership and whether employees feel valued can all influence how people feel about their employer.

This means that persistent employee turnover can sometimes be a symptom of a wider workplace culture problem.

The difficulty for HR and senior leaders is determining which issues actually matter within their organisation.

Rather than guessing, organisations can use employee surveys to identify potential cultural problems, 360-degree feedback to explore leadership and management behaviours, and coaching to help managers and leaders make meaningful changes.

What Is Workplace Culture?

Workplace culture is sometimes treated as something intangible, but employees experience it every day.

It can be reflected in questions such as:

• How do managers behave towards their teams?
• Do employees feel listened to?
• Are people recognised for good work?
• Is it acceptable to challenge decisions?
• Do leaders communicate openly?
• Are workloads considered reasonable?
• Do employees believe opportunities are fair?
• Can people develop their careers?
• Do employees trust senior leadership?
• Do the organisation’s stated values match what actually happens?

Culture therefore isn’t simply about having a set of corporate values.

It is about how it feels to work within the organisation.

When that experience is consistently poor, employees may eventually decide they would rather work somewhere else.

Is Workplace Culture Really Causing Your Employee Turnover?

It might be. But don’t assume that it is.

This distinction is important.

If an organisation has a retention problem, management may develop theories about the cause. Senior leaders might believe employees are leaving because competitors pay more, while HR might suspect workload or management quality.

Employees themselves may have a completely different explanation.

Making substantial changes based on assumptions can waste time and money without addressing the real problem.

A better starting point is to gather evidence.

Exit interviews can help explain why people have already left. Employee engagement surveys and other forms of employee listening can help organisations understand what their current employees are experiencing before they decide to leave.

The objective should be to answer two questions:

Where are our cultural problems?

And:

Which of those problems are most likely to affect engagement and retention?

1. Employees Don’t Feel Recognised or Valued

People want to know that their contribution matters.

This doesn’t necessarily mean financial rewards. Recognition can include feedback from managers, acknowledgement of good work, opportunities for greater responsibility and simply knowing that someone’s contribution has been noticed.

A culture in which good performance is routinely overlooked can gradually affect motivation and engagement.

The problem is that managers may believe they provide plenty of recognition while employees experience something very different.

An employee survey can test this.

Questions can explore whether employees feel valued, whether good performance is recognised and whether they receive useful feedback from their manager.

Results can then be compared between teams or departments.

If most of the organisation reports positively but one department scores substantially lower, the issue may not be the organisation’s recognition policy. It could indicate differences in local management behaviour.

That distinction matters because the appropriate response is very different.

2. Poor Work-Life Balance and Unsustainable Workloads

Occasional periods of pressure are normal in many organisations.

A culture in which excessive workloads become permanent is different.

Employees who regularly feel overwhelmed, unable to disconnect from work or unsupported when workloads become difficult may eventually question whether they want to remain with the organisation.

Flexible and hybrid working can form part of the picture, but work-life balance is about more than where someone works.

It can include workload, expectations outside normal working hours, management behaviour, staffing levels, autonomy and whether employees feel comfortable saying that they have too much work.

Employee surveys can help organisations distinguish between an isolated workload problem and something more systemic.

For example, results might show that workload concerns are concentrated within a particular function, location or management team.

That gives the organisation somewhere specific to investigate rather than introducing an organisation-wide initiative that may not address the actual problem.

3. Employees Cannot See a Future With the Organisation

Employees don’t necessarily need a promotion every year, but many want to feel that they are developing.

If people cannot see opportunities to learn, progress or take on new challenges, competitors may become more attractive.

Career development is therefore an important area to investigate when looking at employee retention.

An employee survey might explore whether people:

• understand their career opportunities;
• have useful development conversations with their manager;
• believe promotion decisions are fair;
• have access to learning and development;
• feel their skills are being used effectively; and
• believe they can achieve their career aspirations within the organisation.

Again, averages can hide important differences.

Early-career employees, long-serving employees and particular professional groups may have very different perceptions of career development.

Understanding those differences can help organisations create more targeted retention strategies.

4. Poor Management Is Affecting the Employee Experience

The relationship between an employee and their manager can have a significant influence on their experience of work.

Managers influence communication, recognition, workload, development, performance feedback and the way organisational decisions are experienced at team level.

That means a retention problem that initially appears to be about “culture” can sometimes have a management dimension.

An employee survey can help identify this.

If employees within certain teams consistently report lower levels of trust, communication, recognition or support, it may indicate that management behaviour deserves closer investigation.

But an employee survey isn’t necessarily designed to tell an individual manager precisely what they personally need to change.

That’s where another tool can become useful.

How 360-Degree Feedback Can Help Improve Management and Leadership

A 360-degree feedback programme gathers structured feedback about an individual leader or manager from people who experience their behaviour from different perspectives.

Depending on the programme, this can include their manager, peers, direct reports and other colleagues, alongside the individual’s own assessment.

The comparison can be particularly revealing.

A manager might, for example, believe they communicate expectations clearly while their colleagues experience a very different management style.

Another leader might see themselves as empowering but receive feedback suggesting that their team experiences their behaviour as overly controlling.

The purpose of 360 feedback shouldn’t be to find fault.

It should help leaders understand how their behaviour is experienced by others and identify practical development priorities.

This makes employee surveys and 360 feedback complementary rather than interchangeable.

Employee surveys help identify organisational and team-level patterns.

360-degree feedback helps individual managers and leaders understand their own behaviours and impact.

If an employee survey indicates that management quality is a potential cultural weakness, a 360 programme can therefore be a logical next step.

5. Employees Don’t Trust Senior Leadership

Employees’ experience of their immediate manager is only one aspect of workplace culture.

Confidence in senior leadership can matter too.

Employees may become disengaged if they don’t understand where the organisation is going, believe decisions are poorly communicated or feel there is a substantial gap between the organisation’s stated values and leadership behaviour.

This can become particularly important during periods of significant change.

Employee surveys can measure areas such as:

• confidence in senior leaders;
• understanding of organisational direction;
• trust;
• communication;
• visibility of leadership;
• confidence in decision-making; and
• whether leaders appear to demonstrate organisational values.

If leadership emerges as an area of concern, deeper analysis can help determine whether the problem is organisation-wide or associated with particular leadership groups.

360-degree feedback can then provide individual leaders with more detailed insight into how their own behaviour is perceived.

6. Communication Is Poor or Employees Don’t Feel Heard

Communication isn’t simply about sending employees more emails.

Effective organisational communication requires employees to understand what is happening, why decisions are being made and what those decisions mean for them.

It also needs to work in both directions.

Employees should have opportunities to express concerns, ask questions and provide feedback.

An employee survey is one way of creating that listening mechanism, particularly when employees can respond confidentially.

However, asking for feedback creates expectations.

If employees repeatedly complete surveys and nothing appears to happen afterwards, they may conclude that providing feedback is pointless.

That is why an effective employee listening process must include action and communication after the survey.

7. Employees Are Unclear About Their Roles and Expectations

Role ambiguity can create frustration, duplication, conflict and unnecessary stress.

Employees need to understand what is expected of them, how their work contributes to wider organisational objectives and how their performance will be evaluated.

Managers have an important role in creating that clarity.

If survey findings suggest that employees don’t understand priorities or expectations, organisations should investigate whether the issue comes from job design, organisational communication, management capability or a combination of factors.

Again, identifying the underlying cause is more useful than simply trying to improve an overall engagement score.

Use Employee Surveys to Diagnose the Problem

If you suspect workplace culture is contributing to employee turnover, a well-designed employee engagement survey or culture survey can provide a structured starting point.

Rather than asking a few generic questions about whether employees are happy, the survey should investigate the different factors that shape their experience.

These might include:

• leadership
• management
• recognition
• communication
• career development
• workload
• wellbeing
• teamwork
• inclusion
• autonomy
• organisational values
• trust
• resources and support
• intention to remain

The results can then be analysed across relevant employee groups.

For an international organisation, this could include differences between countries, regions or locations. Other organisations might need to understand differences between departments, job roles, grades or lengths of service.

The aim isn’t to produce as much data as possible.

It is to identify where action is most needed and what leaders should prioritise.

Surveys Tell You What Is Happening. Analysis Helps Explain Why.

One danger with employee surveys is focusing too heavily on headline scores.

Imagine an organisation discovers that 68% of employees respond positively to a question about management support.

The number alone doesn’t tell leaders what to do.

Is 68% good or bad?

Has it improved?

Does it vary dramatically between departments?

Is management support associated with employees’ intention to remain?

What other survey questions appear to move alongside it?

Good survey analysis moves beyond reporting percentages and starts investigating relationships and patterns within the data.

That is particularly important when employee retention is the objective.

Rather than asking only “What are our lowest scores?”, organisations should also ask:

“Which aspects of the employee experience appear most important to engagement and retention?”

That creates a much stronger basis for action.

When Survey Results Point Towards Leadership, Consider 360 Feedback

An organisation-wide employee survey shouldn’t automatically result in every manager being sent on the same training course.

If leadership and management emerge as significant issues, investigate further.

A 360-degree feedback programme can give managers and leaders personalised insight into areas such as communication, delegation, decision-making, relationships, leadership style and people management.

This creates a progression from organisational diagnosis to individual development:

Employee survey: Where are employees experiencing problems?

360-degree feedback: What behaviours might individual leaders need to understand or change?

But there is still another stage.

Knowing what needs to change doesn’t necessarily make changing it easy.

Turn Insight Into Behaviour Change Through Coaching

A detailed 360 report can create valuable self-awareness, but its value depends on what happens afterwards.

Management or executive coaching can help an individual interpret their feedback, decide what they want to change and translate those intentions into practical behaviour.

For example, a manager might discover through 360 feedback that colleagues perceive them as poor at delegation.

Simply telling the manager to “delegate more” may achieve very little.

Coaching can explore why they find delegation difficult, what behaviours need to change, what they will do differently and how progress will be evaluated.

This creates a much stronger development process:

Feedback → Reflection → Action → Behaviour change

Coaching can therefore be particularly useful where survey and 360 feedback has identified leadership behaviours that may be affecting the wider employee experience.

Then Measure Whether Anything Has Improved

This is the stage organisations can easily overlook.

If you conduct an employee survey, introduce management development and coaching, and then never measure the employee experience again, how do you know whether anything changed?

Follow-up employee surveys or shorter pulse surveys can help organisations track progress.

If management communication was identified as a weakness, for example, a later pulse survey could investigate whether employees have noticed an improvement.

This closes the loop:

1. Listen to employees

2. Identify cultural issues

3. Investigate leadership behaviours where appropriate

4. Develop managers and leaders

5. Measure whether employees experience an improvement

This is much more powerful than treating an employee survey, 360 feedback exercise or coaching programme as a standalone HR initiative.

Don’t Ask Employees for Feedback Unless You’re Prepared to Act

Employee surveys do not improve workplace culture by themselves.

Neither does 360-degree feedback.

The value comes from what an organisation does with the information.

One of the quickest ways to undermine an employee listening programme is to ask employees for their views repeatedly without demonstrating that anything changes as a result.

Organisations don’t have to implement every suggestion employees make.

But they should communicate what they have learned, explain the priorities they have selected and demonstrate what happens next.

Employees should be able to see a connection between giving feedback and organisational action.

A Practical Approach to Improving Workplace Culture

If high turnover is creating concern about workplace culture, avoid jumping immediately to solutions.

Start with diagnosis.

Listen. Use employee engagement or culture surveys to understand what employees are experiencing.

Analyse. Identify the issues most strongly associated with engagement, retention and the employee experience.

Prioritise. Focus on a manageable number of areas where change could make a meaningful difference.

Develop. Where leadership or management behaviour is part of the problem, use tools such as 360-degree feedback and coaching to support individual development.

Act. Make tangible organisational and management changes.

Measure. Use pulse surveys or future engagement surveys to determine whether employees are experiencing an improvement.

The result is an evidence-led approach to culture rather than a collection of disconnected HR initiatives.

How Protostar Can Help

Protostar helps organisations understand and improve the employee experience through employee engagement surveys, culture surveys, pulse surveys, 360-degree feedback and management coaching.

Our approach is consultancy-led rather than simply providing organisations with survey software.

We can help organisations design the right questions, gather confidential employee feedback, analyse the findings and understand what the results mean.

Where leadership and management development emerges as a priority, 360-degree feedback can provide managers and leaders with more individualised insight, while coaching can support them in turning that feedback into practical behavioural change.

For organisations operating internationally, survey and feedback programmes can also be delivered across multiple countries and languages.

The objective isn’t simply to collect more HR data.

It is to give leaders better evidence for making decisions about their people and organisation.

Is Your Workplace Culture Contributing to Employee Turnover?

If employees are leaving and you aren’t confident you understand why, don’t assume that salary is the only explanation.

Your employees can provide valuable insight into what is working, what isn’t and where change is needed.

An independently managed employee survey can provide the starting point. If the findings identify leadership or management challenges, 360-degree feedback and coaching can help turn that organisational insight into individual development and practical change.

Speak to Protostar about using employee surveys, 360-degree feedback and coaching to better understand and address the people issues affecting your organisation.