February 26, 2025
We discuss the concept of employee morale within our team often. We discuss it because it is important and maintaining a good environment for our team is one of our business’s values. While some might dismiss “positive morale” as a soft benefit of a workplace, we’ve found over the years that it isn’t just a vague nicety to promote, it is essential to building a workforce that remains engaged, growing, and improving over time.
Businesses that fail to retain employees face significant operational, financial, and cultural challenges. High employee retention rates indicate a stable and satisfied workforce, while low retention rates signal deeper organizational issues. Within GLC’s place as a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company, managing people and assembling teams is a huge part of what we do. While other businesses might recognize retention issues and costs building up over time, or draining resources slowly, the nature of our business has given us experience in hiring for culture fit and personality to avoid these consequences.
Among our tenured leaders it’s somewhat easier to claim a culture of respect, honesty, and integrity. But in order to have truly positive morale among our team, to the point that our staff feels the results of that culture, we aspire to find those aspects in the personalities of every person we hire.
For Rodney Howard, a GLC site manager, building a culture of encouragement and respect has been instrumental to our team. Although Rodney is fairly new to our team, being in position for just over a year, he has embraced the team culture that GLC strives for.
Rodney strips company culture down to the essentials of respect saying, “It’s important to listen, have huddles, be real, and treat people like human beings.” As basic as it may sound, we find that in the day-to-day operations for those who work consistent, full-time tasks, these principles of simple recognition often go overlooked. When that happens morale falls, and with it employee retention drops.
Rodney says he tries to offer a platform for any issues that might come up. While he strives to be authoritative, he also aims to be a problem solver. Embracing a long-held GLC value, he wants every individual to do what they do best with as minimal interference as possible. To him, that means setting expectations, being honest, and rising to any challenges as they arise.
Ensuring that those building blocks of positive culture are felt throughout the site that he manages, Rodney utilizes the same skill-set as he assures our partners’ needs are met. He listens intently to their needs and wants, and checks deadlines. He assures compliance and policy with every step. As we try to hire for an inter-company culture fit between our company and our clients, Rodney knows that setting and achieving expectations can be the difference between a satisfied workplace and one that falls short.
In discussing company culture with Rodney, we found that it is not just something that he promotes within his site, but something that he personally experiences through his interactions with the GLC management team. As opposed to positions outside GLC where Rodney felt overlooked, or even undervalued; GLC VP John Solomon, gives him honest feedback and provides space to learn from mistakes and improve over time. Rodney says, “This is the first company I’ve worked for that values me not only as an employee, but as a person.”
The fact that Rodney could give voice to that experience means so much to the GLC leadership team. It confirms that we are succeeding in building positive company culture, even outside of our headquarters. The results of this are demonstrated as our retention rate remains well above the national average. Rodney speaks to having a company structure that lets people know that they are valued and that their co-workers care.
While we’re glad to see that GLC’s culture of respect, honesty, and integrity, has set roots in the offices where we have a team presence, we know that it is just one thing that will help us to keep the staff that we value so much. It takes time to get to know our clients and their preferences, and retention is one key way by which we can let them Consider It Done.
To close out, we want to quote Rodney’s words to our partner that he supports. He once said to them “When you win, GLC wins.” With our team often working in the background, sometimes it’s hard to see an individual hand in each success. We know that every person on our team helps contribute to major successes for our clients. We hope that they can feel the achievement in that, and know our gratitude. For our leaders, success is never found just in the job or in the task, but in each person we serve- that’s a value worth retaining.