Attracting the Best, Part 1: The Employee Experience
Debbie Morrison • August 19, 2021

Attracting the Best, Part 1: The Employee Experience

Attracting and retaining top talent starts from the inside out. In this – the first of a two-part series about getting the best employees on board – we look first at five critical elements of your employee experience.


When recruitment is your business, as it is ours, there’s one question that’s central to every conversation we have with our clients: How can we attract the very best candidates for every position?


Our work gives us uniquely valuable insight. Speaking with people every day about changing jobs, we hear why some want to leave their current employer, or why others choose to stay. We also hear what they’re looking for in their next company and job; the things that will attract and keep them performing at their best.


This is the first in a two-part series, focusing first on the employee experience. It makes sense to approach this from the inside out: if a company can’t retain great employees, it won’t be able to recruit great employees either. This was always true, to a certain extent, but it’s even more so now. Between social media generally, and employer-rating sites (like Glassdoor) specifically, word gets around more quickly and widely than ever before. This is great for transparency, of course, but it puts more pressure on employers to make sure that the experience they offer their employees is a good one.


When considering this question, it’s tempting to jump to ‘culture’. While it’s true that corporate culture is part of the equation, it’s a bit of a red herring, for several reasons. First, because it’s subjective: what constitutes a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ culture varies from employee to employee. Secondly, because culture is something that management can influence but not entirely control or create. Culture develops organically within an organisation (or within various parts of an organisation) as a result of day-to-day practices and decisions. Below are the five most controllable elements that influence culture and can create a great employee experience that attracts and retains top performing employees.


Compensation

Compensation and benefits are fundamental to the employee experience. Let’s face it, this is the main reason most employees work in the first place. Not every company can match the highest salaries in the market, and the good news is that no company needs to. Money is usually not the primary factor an employee considers when choosing to take a new job. To successfully recruit great employees, companies just have to be competitive. Above the median range for comparable positions, and offering decent benefits. These benefits can have monetary value like health coverage or a yearly training allowance, but increasingly, non-monetary benefits like flex time and the ability to work from home are equally valuable to many employees (and accessible even to organisations with limited budgets).


Communication

One hallmark of companies that attract and retain the best employees is the quality of communication throughout the organisation. Top performing employees want to know that they can speak openly about opportunities and challenges they see around them, and they want to know that they’ll be heard. Top performers also generally seek out more information about their own performance. Annual performance reviews may still be a necessary formality, but great companies and the managers in them know that ongoing dialogue is the best way to keep their best employees fully engaged.


Trust and Respect

These attributes are flip sides of the same coin. The best employees choose employers who trust them to do their work, and who show respect for them. Micromanagement is the fastest way to undermine a sense of trust; instead, great companies foster an environment in which performance is measured by clear expectations and results, and employees are trusted – and held accountable – to deliver those results. Great companies also encourage respect for results through recognition; bonuses and other perks can be part of the picture, but more often it comes down to simple acknowledgement. Whether verbally or in writing, public or one-to-one, a sincere ‘excellent work, thank you’ carries immense value for employees.


Opportunity to Perform

Getting the right people on the ‘bus’ is only half of the job. The other half is making sure those people are in the right seats. Top performing employees seek out roles where they have the chance to do their best work every day, and to get even better over time. Great companies provide them with this opportunity because they don’t just staff up to fill seats. They think more deeply about the skills and strengths of their current and prospective employees, they take advantage of opportunities to allow them to stretch the boundaries of their role and responsibilities, and in doing so they provide the opportunity for their employees to learn, grow, and develop their knowledge and abilities further.


Connection to Mission

Great employees at all levels of an organisation aren’t generally satisfied with being a ‘cog in the machine’. They want to know how their work connects to the bigger picture. Great companies, and the managers within them, make this connection clear to their people. They’re always looking for opportunities to show how each person’s daily tasks contribute to the mission and purpose of the organisation, helping to move it forward and achieve its goals.


If you’re not already doing so, it pays to keep your fingers on the pulse of employee satisfaction through well-designed surveys (the Gallup Q12, for example), and also by monitoring what people are saying about your organization – on Glassdoor, if nowhere else. Looking to sources of information like this can provide helpful direction about ways in which you can take your employee experience from good … to great.


In the second part of this series on attracting the best and brightest, I’ll focus on the element that some companies overlook entirely (creating great opportunities for companies that put focus there): the candidate experience.

Your Culture Report Won’t Show You This

By John Elliott • June 6, 2025
On paper, they were fully resourced. No complaints logged. No formal red flags. Delivery metrics holding steady. But behind closed doors, the signs were there. Delays. Fatigue. Silence in meetings where pushback used to live. And a growing sense that key people were leaning out, emotionally, if not yet physically. When the cracks finally showed, the conclusion was predictable: “We need more people.” But that wasn’t the real problem. The problem was trust. And most organisations never see it until it’s too late. The Hidden Cost of Disengagement In Gallup’s 2023 global workplace report , only 23% of employees worldwide reported being actively engaged at work. A staggering 59% identified as “quiet quitting”, psychologically detached, going through the motions, doing only what their job description demands. Source: Gallup Global Workplace Report 2023 Disengagement is expensive. But it’s also quiet. It doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. It doesn’t send a Slack message. Disengagement isn’t new, just silenced. And in executive teams, it looks different. It looks like polite agreement in strategy meetings. It looks like leaders shielding their teams from unrealistic demands, instead of confronting the system causing them. It looks like performance metrics still being met… while people emotionally check out. The issue isn’t always capability. It’s safety. Psychological, political, and professional. Many senior leaders don’t raise concerns, not because the problem isn’t real, but because they don’t believe they’ll be heard, supported, or protected if they do. And this is where the failure begins. The Leadership Lie No One Talks About We talk a lot about leadership capability. About experience, commercial acumen, execution strength. But we don’t talk enough about context. Every leadership hire walks into a culture they didn’t create. They inherit unwritten rules, quiet alliances, and legacy power structures. If those dynamics are broken, or if trust is fractured at the top, no amount of capability will compensate. According to a 2022 Deloitte mid-market survey, 64% of executives said culture was their top strategic priority. But only 27% said they actually measured it in a meaningful way. We say culture matters. But we rarely structure around it. And so new leaders walk in with pressure to perform, but little real insight into what the role will cost them emotionally, politically, or personally. We Don’t Hire for Trust. And It Shows. In executive search, the conversation is often dominated by pedigree and “fit.” But fit is often a euphemism for sameness. And sameness doesn't build trust, it maintains comfort. We rarely ask: Does this leader know how to build trust vertically and horizontally? Can they operate in a low-trust environment without becoming complicit? Will they challenge inherited silence, or unconsciously uphold it? Instead, we hire for confidence and clarity, traits that often mask what’s broken, rather than reveal it. And when those hires fail? We call it a mismatch. Or we cite the usual: “lack of alignment,” “wasn’t the right time,” “they didn’t land well with the team.” But the truth is often uglier: They were never set up to succeed. And no one told them until it was too late. The Cultural Infrastructure Is Missing One of the most damaging myths in leadership hiring is that great leaders will “make it work.” That if they’re tough enough, experienced enough, skilled enough, they’ll overcome any organisational dysfunction. But high-performance isn’t just personal. It’s systemic. It requires psychological safety. A clear mandate. The backing to make hard decisions. The freedom to speak the truth before it becomes a PR problem. When that infrastructure isn’t there, when the real power dynamics are unspoken, good leaders stop speaking too. And the silence spreads. What Trust Breakdown Really Looks Like Often, the signs of a trust breakdown don’t show up in dramatic ways. They surface subtly in patterns of underperformance that are easy to misread or excuse. You start to notice project delays, but no one flags the root cause. Teams keep things moving, quietly compensating for the bottlenecks rather than surfacing them. Not because they’re careless, but because they’ve learned that early honesty doesn’t always earn support. New leaders hesitate to make bold calls. Not because they lack conviction, but because the last time they did, they were left exposed. Board reports look flawless. Metrics track nicely. But spend five minutes on the floor, and the energy tells a different story. These are not resource issues. They’re relationship issues. And the data backs it. According to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report , just 23% of employees worldwide are actively engaged. Worse, around 60% are “quiet quitting.” That’s not just disengagement. It’s people doing only what’s safe, only what’s required, because trust has quietly eroded. Gallup also found that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, a staggering figure that reinforces just how pivotal leadership trust is. When people don’t feel psychologically safe, they shut down. Not dramatically. Quietly. Invisibly. What’s breaking isn’t the org chart. It’s the ability to speak plainly and be heard. And by the time it’s visible? The damage is already done, and someone calls for a restructure. “Low engagement is estimated to cost the global economy $8.8 trillion, 9% of global GDP.” Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2023 So What’s the Real Takeaway? If you’re seeing performance issues, before you jump to headcount, ask a different question: Do the leaders in this business feel safe enough to tell the truth? Because if they don’t, the data you’re reading isn’t real. And if they do, but you’re not acting on it, then they’ll stop telling you. Leadership doesn’t fail in obvious ways anymore. It fails in the gap between what people know and what they’re allowed to say. And the price of that silence? Missed opportunity. Reputational damage. Cultural decay. Sometimes, the problem isn’t who you hired. It’s what you’ve made it unsafe to say.

The Energy’s Gone, But Everything Still Looks Fine

By John Elliott • May 27, 2025
Why Culture Decay in FMCG Is a Silent Threat to Performance It doesn’t start with resignations. It starts with something much quieter. A head of operations stops raising small problems in weekly meetings. A sales lead no longer defends a risky new SKU. A team member who used to push ideas now just delivers what they’re asked. Nothing breaks. Nothing explodes. It just... slows. And from the outside, everything still looks fine. The illusion of stability In food and beverage manufacturing, where teams run lean and pressure is constant, performance often becomes the proxy for culture. If products are shipping, if margins are intact, if reviews are clean, the assumption is: we're good. But that assumption is dangerous. According to Gallup's 2023 global workplace report, only 23% of employees worldwide are actively engaged, while a staggering 59% are "quiet quitting ", doing just enough to get by, with no emotional investment. And in Australia? Engagement has declined three years in a row. In a mid-market FMCG business, those numbers rarely show up on dashboards. But they show up in other ways: New ideas stall at the concept phase Team members stop challenging assumptions Execution becomes rigid instead of agile Everyone is "aligned" but no one is energised And by the time the board sees a drop in revenue, the belief that once drove the business is already gone. The emotional cost of cultural silence One thing we don’t talk about enough is what this does to leadership. When energy drains, leaders often become isolated. Not because they want to be, but because the organisation has lost the instinct to challenge, question, or stretch. I’ve seen CEOs second-guessing themselves in rooms full of agreement. Seen GMs miss red flags because nobody wanted to be "the problem". Seen founders mistake quiet delivery for deep buy-in. The emotional toll of unspoken disengagement is real. You’re surrounded by people doing their jobs. But no one’s really in it with you. And eventually, leaders stop stretching too. We train people to disengage without realising it Here’s the contradiction that most organisations won’t admit: We say we want initiative, but we reward obedience. The safest people get promoted The optimists get extra work The truth-tellers get labelled difficult So people learn to conserve energy. They learn not to challenge ideas that won’t land. They learn not to flag risks that won’t be heard. And over time, they stop showing up with their full selves. This isn't resistance. It's protection. And it becomes the default when innovation is punished, risk isn't buffered, and "alignment" becomes code for silence. Boards rarely see it in time Boards don’t ask about belief. They ask about performance. But belief is what drives performance. When culture begins to fade, it doesn't look like chaos. It looks like calm. It looks like compliance. But underneath, the organisation is hollowing out. By the time a board notices the energy is gone, it’s often because the financials have turned, and by then, the people who could've helped reverse the trend have already left. In a 2022 Deloitte study on mid-market leadership, 64% of executives said culture was their top priority, yet only 27% said they measured it with any rigour . If you don’t track it, you won’t protect it. And if you don’t protect it, don’t be surprised when it disappears. The real risk: you might not get it back Here’s what no one likes to admit: Not all cultures recover. You can try rebrands. You can run engagement campaigns. You can roll out leadership frameworks and off-sites and feedback platforms. But if belief has been neglected for too long, the quiet ones you depended on, the culture carriers, the stretchers, the informal leaders, they’re already checked out. Some have left. Some are still there physically but not emotionally. And some have started coaching others to play it safe. Once that happens, you're not rebuilding. You're replacing. So what do you do? Don’t listen for noise. Listen for absence. Absence of challenge. Absence of stretch. Absence of belief. Ask yourself: When was the last time someone in the business pushed back? Not rudely, but bravely? When did someone offer an idea that made others uncomfortable? When did a leader admit they were unsure and ask for help? Those are your indicators. Because healthy culture isn’t silent. It’s alive. It vibrates with tension, disagreement, contribution and care. If everything looks fine, but no one’s really leaning in? That’s your problem. And by the time it shows up in the numbers,t might already be too late.