Follow us on LinkedInIf you’d told me ten years ago I’d be talking to HR leaders talking about culture, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. I’ve never thought of myself as the smartest person in the room, and honestly, I still don’t.
What I do have is a couple of strengths that have stuck with me across every stage of my career: I love training and development, and I’ve got a knack for improving culture in companies that are struggling with it, especially when it comes to reducing turnover.
About me
I’m currently the Chief People Officer at Inszone Insurance. We’re a PE-backed business that hires around 500 new people a year. That’s not a typo.
We also acquire about 50 small insurance agencies annually, which means that every quarter we’re integrating around 125 new employees into our culture. So when I talk about culture and turnover, I’m not speaking in theory. I’m in the trenches.
I want to share five practical, free strategies that I’ve used to reduce turnover, improve communication, and build a culture that can actually keep up with rapid growth.
Nothing here is particularly revolutionary. Most of it I’ve stolen (with love) from people smarter than me. But every one of these things is actionable, and they work.
Matt Rieck
Start by knowing your turnover cost
Here’s a question I ask other HR leaders all the time: Do you know how much your company spent on turnover last year?
Most don’t.
That’s a problem because if we want a seat at the table, we need to speak in numbers, not vibes.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that replacing an employee costs 12 to 18 months of their salary.
I usually go conservative and use one year’s salary as a benchmark. At Inszone, the average salary is about $61,000. So if we lost 100 people last year, that’s $6.1 million in churn-related costs.
To calculate your company’s rough turnover cost:
Turnover Cost = Average Salary × Number of Departures
Once you’ve got that number, set up a meeting with your CFO. Walk them through the math. Ask: “Is this how you’d calculate it?” If you can align with your CFO on the cost of turnover, you’ll get the executive buy-in you need to invest in culture and retention.
You don’t need to win the whole C-suite. Start with one ally who speaks spreadsheet.
Understand the cost of losing A-Players
In most companies, your top 20% of employees are the ones driving the majority of your results.
They’re accountable, proactive, and they make things better around them. When you lose one of those people, it’s not just a gap, it’s a ripple.
They take institutional knowledge, morale, and performance with them. And the rest of the team notices. When your rockstar salesperson leaves, the rest of your sales team starts wondering if they should too.
On the other end, we’ve all got C players, the bottom 20%. They’re the ones who coast, avoid accountability, and don’t push themselves. Too often, we tolerate them. We think, “They’re not hurting anything.” But they are. They quietly drag down your culture. And worse, your A players see it.
When high performers see low performers being allowed to stick around with no consequences, it sends a message: This company doesn’t care about standards. And that’s when your best people start to leave.
Sabrinthia Donnelly
Use these five strategies to build real culture
So how do you fix this? Culture isn’t a slide deck. It’s not values painted on the wall. It’s what people see, hear, and feel every day.
And, in my experience, five low-lift strategies can make a huge difference.
1. Quarterly all-company meetings
Every quarter, our leadership team spends 45 minutes on Zoom with the whole company. Here’s the simple structure:
- We highlight new hires, promotions, and employee milestones
- A familiar face (like someone from HR) kicks it off
- We recognise top performers in sales and service
Our CEO gives a brief talk: where we are, where we’re going, and how we’ll get there together. And that’s it.
The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. People feel more connected to leadership, they feel informed, and they feel seen. We always send out a quick survey afterward and make adjustments for the next one.
If your C-suite won’t carve out 45 minutes a quarter for this, you’ve got a bigger problem.
Rebecca Stewart
2. Four-question succession planning
Succession planning doesn’t have to be complicated. Here’s the four-question model we use:
- If you left today, who would take over your role?
- How long would it take for them to be ready?
- What skills are they missing today?
- What’s your plan to help them build those skills?
That final question about missing skills is where your training roadmap comes from.
If every manager does this for every role, you start building internal mobility in a tangible way. And if a manager says “nobody” can take their job? That’s a hiring or development gap we need to address.
3. Weekly team meetings
Every team, every manager, once a week, 15–20 minutes. Here’s the script:
- How was your weekend?
- What did you work on last week?
- What’s your focus this week?
It builds alignment. It surfaces redundancy. It creates human connection. And most importantly, it builds accountability.
If someone says they’ll do something and doesn’t? You don’t call them out in front of everyone, you follow up privately. Praise in public, coach in private. But the rhythm of these meetings keeps teams focused and bonded.
4. Train your managers, even just a little
Most companies promote their top individual contributor into management with zero training. We all know the story: The best widget-maker becomes the widget manager… but nobody checks if they can manage people.
At Inszone, we host monthly one-hour manager trainings over Zoom. Topics include: Communication, coaching, conflict resolution, leading through change and running effective teams.
You don’t need expensive software. You can build this content yourself. Or borrow mine, just reach out and I’ll share it.
The point is: if you’re expecting managers to be culture carriers, you have to invest in them.
5. Use social media for employee recognition
We run daily recognition posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and internally via email. Each post takes five minutes to create. One photo, two paragraphs. That’s it.
We spotlight promotions, birthdays, anniversaries, and much more. The impact is huge. Employees feel seen. Prospective hires see a company that values its people. And most importantly, we subtly reinforce what “good” looks like.
If I post about Bernadette getting the employee spotlight because of her leadership and client wins, everyone else sees what we value. That’s how you create behavioural reinforcement at scale for free.
Sabrinthia Donnelly
What I want you to take away
If there's anything I want you to take away from this article, it's the following:
- You don’t need a massive budget to fix culture
- You need consistency, visibility, and accountability
- You need to talk in numbers, not fluff
- You need to show your execs the real cost of turnover and the upside of retention
And most importantly, you need to make it easy for people to care about the business, about their growth, and about each other.
We’re not perfect at Inszone. We’re still learning. But these five tools have helped us create connection, drive down churn, and build a company where people want to stay.
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