Building a strong workplace culture doesn't start with hiring amazing new people that will transform your business.  It starts with caring for and developing the people you already have.

Last week, The Physio Co was ranked by BRW at No. 5 on it's annual list of Australia's 50 Best Places to Work.  This amazing achievement has taken years of hard work and has helped us learn many lessons along the way.  Here's how we learnt that recruitment starts with retention...

Many people think that as a great place to work, the recruitment team are probably overwhelmed by the volume of applications of people wanting to work there.  Sometimes that's true, but, for The Physio Co, we've also had some tougher times...

In the early years, we had a dip in our always-high retention rates.  Now the dip wasn't debilitating, but, we lost a few physios at a time that is historically very hard to recruit newbies.  The result was increased pressure on our existing team because of all the work we had to do with less people to do it.  As the weeks went by morale was pretty low.  At this point, our ability to recruit new recruits was much lower than it needed to be.

How did we deal with it?  We reorganised our teams, promoted more team leaders and supported every member of our existing team more than ever.  We got back to the basics of caring for the personal and professional lives of our team.  We acknowledged the great work they'd been doing, added extra resources where we could and thought about why we do we what we do.  We focussed on retention.

Slowly, but very steadily, things started to change.  We all started to enjoy our jobs again, retention headed back towards our traditionally high levels and we started attracting some great new physios to join the family.

Now, years on from that time, we have a bigger team, stronger culture and higher retention than ever before.  Our pipeline of new recruits has been strong ever since and is looking positive as we head into exciting growth periods ahead.

High retention rate is one sign of a strong workplace culture.  When retention is high, confidence in a business is high.  That confidence is palpable to everyone from team members who are more willing to refer their friends, recruiters who feel excited about finding the next new hire (confident recruiters recruit better) and of course the applicants themselves.  Who wouldn't want to join a buzzing culture with high retention and excited team members asking you how you'll help bring their vision to life?

To build a stronger culture in your team, stop hunting for great new culture-fits and start farming the followers you already have.