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    The ROI of Impact-Driven HR Initiatives on the Workplace

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    Investing in people in business can often mirror the stock market — volatile, reactive, and rarely steady in any single pattern for too long. When talent wars rage, some companies scramble to outdo one another with benefits and perks, vying for the title of “best place to work.” Yet, as soon as the climate cools off and the talent pool swells, those same enticing benefits put forth as a recruiting and retention mechanism are frequently the first to go, leaving employees wondering where the promises went. This cycle of overcorrection can undermine trust and erode the foundation companies need to weather inevitable market fluctuations and other challenges.
    Companies that break free from this cycle do so by anchoring their people strategy in something more enduring than market trends — namely, shared values. When investment in employees is consistent and rooted in a clear sense of purpose, it can act as a stabilizing force. Employees sense that their growth and well-being actually matter to leadership, not just when it’s convenient, but as a core part of the organization’s identity. Reliability such as this builds loyalty and facilitates an environment where people are willing to invest their best selves (and their best work) in return.
    In fact, recent data shows organizations that have made a strategic investment in employee development report 11% greater profitability and are twice as likely to retain their employees. When companies show a consistent and long-term interest in the development of their workforce, employees feel more secure in their jobs, are encouraged to grow and innovate, and ultimately, contribute better, more creative inputs that boost business performance. By consistently investing in people through development opportunities, both inside and outside of work, companies can forge work environments where employees desire to stay.
    Purpose in Practice with Value-Driven Development
    When companies offer their employees the chance to pursue purpose-driven experiences, remarkable things can happen. Opportunities such as nonprofit board service, skills-based volunteering or extra-hands volunteering don’t function as mere add-ons; instead, they can become powerful laboratories for experience and growth.
    Employees who step into these roles return with sharpened judgment, expanded empathy, and a renewed sense of mission. The lessons learned in these arenas — navigating ambiguity, building consensus, and driving change, for example — can translate directly into stronger leadership and more dynamic teams.
    In turn, this catalyzes a ripple effect that transforms the workplace. Teams benefit from fresh perspectives and a broader understanding of the world, while individuals discover new reserves of resilience and creativity. Organizations that cultivate these experiences find themselves rewarded with higher engagement, stronger retention, and a reputation that attracts top-tier talent.
    How to Embed Purpose in Your Culture
    Embedding purpose into company culture begins with intentional alignment to identify opportunities that resonate with both the organizational mission and the diverse passions of employees. When people are empowered to pursue experiences that reflect their values, development can operate in two distinct ways, on the personal level and the professional.
    Support offered by an employer is the scaffolding that enables this journey. When employees have access to training, mentorship, and a community of peers who share their commitment to impact, they can thrive. Structured preparation amplifies their influence in the community and builds confidence that carries over into daily work. Employees feel seen by their employers as a whole person, not just an output. For example, I once had a managing director at a prestigious investment firm tell me she didn’t think the leaders at her company knew who she was until she was invited to participate in BoardLead.
    Businesses that invest in these supports witness employees returning with new skills and stories that inspire colleagues, sparking a ripple effect of engagement and innovation.
    Measuring What Matters: The Long-Term ROI of Purpose
    The true impact of value-driven HR initiatives cannot be captured by counting volunteer hours or tracking participation rates alone. The real story unfolds in the narratives employees bring back: how a finance leader’s board experience reshaped their approach to risk, or how a marketer’s community work sparked a breakthrough campaign.
    These real-life, firsthand stories, paired with hard data on engagement and retention, reveal a deeper truth: companies that invest in purpose-driven growth build teams that are more agile, loyal, and invested in long-term success. Over time, these benefits compound. Employees who feel seen and supported become champions for the brand, driving innovation and collaboration. The organization becomes known not just for what it does, but for what it stands for.
    By: Rob Acton, Founder and CEO, Cause Strategy Partners, the technology-powered board placement and governance training provider.
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      in Workplace

      Systemizing Candor: The 3-Step Cycle to Build a High-Candor Culture

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      In any workplace, candor drives clarity, alignment, and growth. When people avoid tough conversations, withhold or sugarcoat feedback, or talk around the real issues, it slows progress or things start to break. But a culture of honesty and directness doesn’t just happen — it has to be designed into how the organization operates. A high-candor culture isn’t a vibe or a value — it’s a system.
      At Garner, we’ve architected a system that makes candor a natural, everyday part of how we work. This 3-step cycle lays out the framework we’ve used to operationalize a high-candor culture — one that can be adapted to the cultural goals of any organization.
      Step 1 – Expectations: codify candor clearly, and where it matters.
      Countless companies list candor in their values or operating principles — let’s call that Step 0. The first step toward operationalizing a high-candor culture is clearly articulating the specific behaviors that entails. It sounds obvious, but it’s worth stating: people can’t meet expectations that aren’t defined.
      Define the behaviors. Employees need to understand what “candor” means for your organization. Often, it’s not about saying whatever’s on your mind without a filter. Should feedback be direct but delivered with care and empathy? Should it be actionable? Are there appropriate or inappropriate settings? How soon should concerns be raised, and to whom? Equally important is setting standards for receiving feedback — what does a healthy reaction, self-reflection, and integration look like? Candor falls flat if no one knows how to handle it.
      Tailor expectations by role or level. Define how standards vary by job type, level, or career stage—outlined through a cultural competency framework. What does candor look like for an entry-level employee? A manager? An executive? For example, Garner’s competencies progress from flagging individual issues, to surfacing recurring themes and pushing to resolve them, to delivering developmental feedback across levels, to creating an environment where candor thrives. Level-specific expectations help embed candor in a way that’s relevant, attainable, and impactful for each person’s responsibilities.
      Embed in decision-making systems. Like any key skill, these expectations must be integrated into the systems that drive decisions — hiring rubrics, performance reviews, development plans, and promotion criteria. This is critical: a value or competency isn’t truly operationalized until it shapes who you hire, how you grow people, and who you reward.
      Step 2 – Mechanisms: design feedback opportunities into the flow of work.
      Once expectations are clear, build systems that make candor a natural part of work. Provide clear, structured opportunities — or even requirements — to practice candor. Structure gives people reps that build the muscle to give feedback in unstructured, everyday moments. Formal feedback mechanisms help normalize informal candor, so over time, people do it naturally on their own.
      Create opportunities. This could take the form of feedback prompts in one-on-ones, 360 feedback during reviews, non-anonymous company or team surveys, and project retrospectives. Determine the natural cadences — or new mechanisms to introduce — that create the opportunity for candor.
      Design the prompts. Craft questions that draw honesty and make it easier to address tough topics. For example, in our peer and upward feedback prompts, we ask, “What can this person improve on?” and make it a required question. This signals that everyone has development areas and it’s each person’s responsibility to help peers — and senior leaders — grow.
      Assess and adapt. Giving feedback alone isn’t enough — it must align with your cultural competencies and add real value. Regularly review the feedback quality and delivery: Is it honest? Actionable? Thoughtful? Spot what’s working and what’s not. Refine prompts, coach where needed, and continuously improve both your systems and your people.
      Step 3 – Enablement: equip and empower people to do it well.
      Most people aren’t naturally skilled at giving or receiving feedback — it’s a learned behavior. We’ve heard employees say they have been penalized in a past role for giving critical feedback to a senior leader. They need to trust not only that candor is expected in your organization, but that they can do it effectively — and that it will be welcomed.
      Invest in training. Teach why candor matters and how to practice it well — both in giving and receiving. Let people observe, dissect, and practice examples of strong vs. weak feedback. Give feedback on the feedback.
      Make it real. Use real, non-scripted case studies to ground training in your company’s context. For example, at Garner’s recent company offsite, we led a culture training for 200+ attendees using a real meeting recording. We prompted poll responses at key moments throughout the video and guided targeted discussions on how each stakeholder approached the issue. The session concluded with the actual meeting participants sharing their own reflections — highlighting our values of transparency and self-reflection. People said this exercise not only taught tangible behaviors but demonstrated that candor at Garner is a lived practice embedded in how we operate.
      Introduce early, revisit often. Cultural onboarding is the moment to set the tone and establish expectations. But it shouldn’t stop there — regularly assess how the culture plays out and offer targeted refresher training at least annually.
      Model and reinforce the behavior. Leaders need to be at the forefront of demonstrating candor aligned with your cultural standards. Just as critical is reinforcing it — recognizing and celebrating when others do it well. The harder the feedback was to give, the more important it is to acknowledge. That can be as simple as saying, “Thanks for the feedback,” every time. When someone gives thoughtful, constructive input, highlight it publicly. Show that candor isn’t just accepted — it’s valued.
      Conclusion
      A high-candor culture is built through a system of clear expectations, embedded mechanisms, and ongoing enablement. As you observe and reinforce behaviors, you’ll uncover what’s working — and what’s not — creating a continuous feedback loop that sharpens the expectations set at the start. That’s why operationalizing candor is a cycle, not a one-time initiative. It takes intention and consistency to sustain a culture that accelerates progress.
      By Nadia Uberoi, Head of People at Garner Health.
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      in Talent Acquisition

      The Metrics That Matter: What HR Leaders Need to Know to Track Progress in 2024

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      Though promises of efficiency, productivity, and experience boosts may have served as initial motivators for HR leaders’ investments in connected technology, there’s another benefit that is slowly but surely stepping into the spotlight: objectivity. As digital toolsets expand and their capabilities grow, talent acquisition (TA) teams are increasingly recognizing the value that comes with quantifying outcomes—especially in a field in which “success” often feels like a moving target.
      That said, not all data is created equal. Some metrics prove more valuable to teams than others, and knowing which ones speak to your organization’s goals is critical to benchmarking performance and making progress. As recruiting’s digital transformation journey continues, learning about the metrics that digital suites can provide—and which matter in the context of your optimization journey—is critical to improving outcomes.
      Seeking success with statistics
      Employ’s recent Recruiter Nation study aimed to get to the heart of the matter, asking participating practitioners to rank key TA performance metrics by their value. Here’s what they said…

      Quality of hire: Quality of hire was overwhelmingly cited as the most valuable metric TA teams use to evaluate success, with nearly one-third (31%) of respondents putting it at the top of their lists and 73% ranked it in their top five. This metric takes into account employee productivity, engagement, culture fit, and other performance feedback to try to add color to recruiter and TA team performance. It also helps teams correlate skills and qualities with successful hires to build more precise profiles for different roles.
      Time to fill: Time to fill reflects the timeline of the average hire, from the day the listing posts to the day a candidate accepts the offer. More than half (59%) of practitioners put time to fill in their top five metrics of value, with 14% saying it is the most valuable metric they use. This information can help highlight opportunities to improve sourcing and interview processes by department, role, or sector.

      At present, the average time to fill across industries, business size, and roles is 47.5 days, but it can vary wildly across industries. At one end of the spectrum are things like media roles, which take an average of 62.21 days to fill in today’s market. Healthcare roles, which are on the other end, take just 38.23 days on average. Knowing the timeframe for your industry critical to planning, as is seeing how your company compares to others.

      Cost per hire: Cost per hire uses operational data to estimate how much it costs to fill a given role. This metric ranks just behind time to fill, with 12% of respondents ranking it in the top spot and 57% putting it among their top five. Knowing the cost of each hire helps teams contextualize recruitment spending and find opportunities to cut waste by adjusting processes to avoid superfluous costs.
      Retention rate: It’s no secret that retention is a top priority in modern businesses, and retention rate data was an easy choice for respondents’ top five lists. Despite only 11% of respondents saying it’s the most valuable metric in their operations, 62% put it in their top five and 14% cited it as their second-most valuable data point.

      To determine retention rates, teams calculate the percentage of employees meeting specific criteria that remain employed over a set period. This exercise can help reveal the characteristics that may lead to employees staying at your company for the long haul and signs that someone might be gearing up to leave.

      Hiring manager satisfaction: Hiring manager satisfaction rounded out respondents’ top five metrics of value, with 53% of practitioners citing it among their top choices (7% said it was their most valuable). This measures managers’ overall satisfaction with the hires made on their behalf using data from qualitative and quantitative surveys. With this information, acquisition teams visualize performance, evaluate progress, and learn from feedback about areas they could improve.

      Of course, all of the above metrics can function at various levels of the business to provide different types of insights and speak to different opportunities for improvement. For example, one company may look at retention rates by department while another may look at this measure through the lens of the recruiter that conducted the search. The former can give insight into ways to improve department-level management practices, while the other may speak to the performance of the TA team member.
      The same is true for any of the metrics noted above—and others. As teams filter results down by various criteria, they are able to find patterns, identify correlations, and identify and test possible solutions.
      What matters to you
      Perhaps the most notable insight is the lack of alignment on the issue overall. Yes, some metrics—like quality of hire—stood out as clear frontrunners. Still, though, none of the options presented were seen as unanimously without value. Even those that scored lower overall were at the top of someone’s list, which speaks to a truth about measuring progress: The perceived value in any metric is directly linked to organizational goals. In short, the difference isn’t between having data and not having it; it’s how you use the data that makes the real difference within an organization.
      Candidate relationship management (CRM) platforms, applicant tracking systems (ATSs), and recruitment marketing software (RMS) all serve as records of past successes and failures. For companies that are used to having “lifers” among their ranks, a metric like retention rate may not be important. But for someone else, finally putting retention performance into tangible, quantifiable terms may yield the insight they’ve been missing.
      Because the possible variations, combinations, and applications of data made available by CRM, ATS, RMS, and other connected platforms are near infinite, it’s up to each company to identify what matters to them. That’s the beauty of connected operations; if you can capture it, you can track it and measure against it. That’s what allows you to experiment with new approaches and find solutions that move the needle for your business, whatever they may be.
      By Josh Jones, talent acquisition manager at Employ Inc.
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