Building Company Culture
Building A Powerful & Effective Company Culture
The Wall Street Journal reports that 85% of employee turnover comes from a lack of connectedness. One of the secrets of both Mitzi’s father’s and her husband’s success is: they both created a culture of astonishing loyalty where over and over again, people who started their careers with them stayed with them for life. People told her that they didn’t just work for these men, they loved them. Many told her that they cried when each of these men died, and that even many years later, they still miss them. This is important because the cost of losing a $50,000 employee can be $150,000 when you take into account recruiting costs for the replacement and the time it takes to get the new person up to speed.
How did Frank Perdue and Ernest Henderson inspire the kind of loyalty that meant people stayed with them and were willing to go above and beyond in helping the company grow?
In this talk, Mitzi shares some of the factors that made this happen. She got to watch not just what they said, but what they actually did, and although both men were tough-as-nails businessmen, they put extreme effort into personal relations. For them, loyalty was a two-way street, and she has many stories about how both men:
- Used the “personal touch” for developing loyalty.
- Used original and innovative techniques for developing a culture in which people take pride in their work.
- Talked tough, but at heart were over-the-top caring, resulting in unusually high retention.