Staff turnover is expensive. Every time an employee leaves, the costs and the headaches start to add up. There’s the immediate scramble to offboard their responsibilities to your remaining team. The hours spent reviewing resumes and interviewing potential candidates. Decision making. Contract negotiations.
Once you finally have your new hire, they can rarely hit the ground running in a new organization. The loss in productivity as they ramp up through onboarding and training is significant. Meanwhile, your team and customers have to adapt to working with someone new.
When this cycle repeats too often, the internal groans when someone hands in their notice quickly turn into plummeting morale and, eventually, chaos.
How much is employee turnover costing YOU? Find out with our employee turnover cost calculator.
Property Vista, a property management solution, was facing exactly this problem. High staff turnover was costing a lot and they recognized the need for a stronger, more cohesive workplace culture. They had hired an HR coordinator but quickly realized they needed strategic leadership to help them. So, they enlisted Castle HR to supercharge their HR strategy.
Adopting a strategic approach to HR goes beyond solving short-term challenges — it can transform a company, boosting growth and increasing profitability. This is the story of how Property Vista, with the help of Castle HR, reduced staff turnover, improved employee engagement, and revitalized its company culture.
Get The Right People In The Right Seats
The right people bring values that align with your organization, which is crucial for maintaining a strong culture. In the right seats, they’re positioned to be productive and drive profits.
Sometimes, getting the right people in the right seats means moving people out of roles where they aren’t a good fit and addressing employees who have become a drain on company culture. However, overturning a team is difficult — it requires strong HR practices and experience to navigate the process effectively.
You Need To Know The Core Issue Holding Your Team Back
Our team has decades of experience in the HR trenches, which means we’re able to dig deeper to pinpoint the cause behind surface-level symptoms like low employee net promoter scores (eNPS). When Castle HR started working with Property Vista, we spent time observing interactions and conducting staff surveys like a mechanic under the hood.
“It’s all the little things,” explains Mike Daser, Senior HR Business Partner at Castle HR, “How [the leadership team] interacted, how they talked to the CEO, how they talked to the other leaders on the team.” We identified that Property Vista needed to focus more on getting the right people in the right seats. Leaders needed to be more visible and humanized.
When you’ve been running a company for a while, it can be challenging to zero in on the root causes of issues. You get used to things being a certain way, and you might not even realize there’s a problem. A fresh set of eyes from an outsider can really help.
How To Successfully Overhaul A Leadership Team
We knew Property Vista needed big changes, but you can’t swoop in and transform a leadership team overnight.
This is where fractional HR stands out from traditional consulting. While consulting tends to offer quick fixes, fractional HR is all about being there for the long haul, working alongside you as a true partner. And in this case, our fractional nature made all the difference. It took two and a half years to stabilize the organization and set it up for growth, and we’ve been there with Property Vista every step of the way.
To have that tough conversation with the CEO about overhauling the team, it was important that he viewed us as an extension of his organization rather than as contractors who stay at arm’s length. “In this case, I’m not Mike at Castle HR; I’m Mike at Property Vista,” explains Mike. Building that level of trust and credibility took work. But our experience with other clients gave us industry trends and proven strategies to support our decisions at Property Vista.
Over time, we became fully embedded in their team. “Every year [the Property Vista team] give out holiday swag, and they’ve always made sure I’ve got some. I use my Property Vista laptop bag every day,” says Mike.
This Is The Value Of Hiring For Values
Once the decision was made to overhaul the leadership team at Property Vista, the next crucial step was determining who would take their place. Mike explains, “I’m a big proponent of the fact that you can teach most people anything they need to do for a job…but you can’t teach them how to contribute to a company culture and live the company’s values.” That has to happen during the hiring process.
We rebuilt Property Vista as a values-based organization. Our approach involved attracting and identifying people who were a values fit through our job descriptions and hiring process.
The results were remarkable. Property Vista saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in turnover costs in just one year. “Castle HR not only helps us build a better People and Culture based business but also saved us a staggering amount…the numbers speak for themselves,” says Leonard Drimmer, Property Vista CEO. They’ve also seen eNPS increase from the 20s to consistently 70+.
When we started working with Property Vista, feedback from staff surveys highlighted issues like siloed communication, bullying behaviour, and disrespect. Now, those surveys have shifted to constructive feedback.
In addition to the personnel changes, getting Property Vista’s CEO to adjust his leadership style was key to driving these impressive results.
Authenticity Is The Secret To Great Leadership
It’s hard for employees to trust or respect a leader they don’t really know. Leaders need to be visible, present, and relatable. They should humanize themselves by sharing their experiences and connecting with the team personally.
When we arrived at Property Vista, the CEO, Leonard Drimmer, was practically invisible, and most employees knew little to nothing about him. For example, during quarterly town halls, the rest of the leadership team presented while he stayed in the background.
We encouraged Leonard to connect with his team by giving welcome messages at those whole-company meetings. Small things like joining in with the daily Slack channels — Monday motivation, pet pics Tuesday, etc. — sharing pictures from his weekend or telling the occasional joke made a huge difference. Suddenly, he wasn’t just a faceless CEO. He was Leonard, someone the team could relate to and respect.
This shift in leadership visibility and our changes to the leadership team opened up communication across the company. Along with a team morale boost (evidenced by the increasing eNPS scores) came a tangible business impact. Property Vista started to grow. They’re now expanding into the U.S. market and launching their first pilot program there.
HR Can Easily Become A Profit Center
Some organizations — especially smaller ones — view HR as a necessary evil rather than a valuable business asset. But Property Vista’s story demonstrates that the right HR intervention (specifically, a fractional team with years of experience, proven playbooks, and an embedded approach) leads to better business outcomes. Business leaders should view HR as a profit force multiplier.
If you’re interested in transforming your HR from a cost center to a profit center, we’re here to help. Book a call with an HR expert.
