I recently worked with a business where the culture just wasn't where it needed to be. People weren't looked after the way they should have been, and honestly, adjusting to it was a real shock to the system - one extreme I hadn't expected to find myself navigating. When the company hit funding trouble and couldn't keep me on, my first reaction wasn't panic. It was relief, if I'm honest. I'm loyal to a fault - I'd probably still be there in 5 years time, telling myself it would get better; so sometimes the push you need isn't the one you'd choose for yourself. That's genuinely what got me here, doing this, on my own terms.
It also crystallised something I already believed but hadn't had to defend out loud before: looking after people properly isn't a nice extra a business should do when times are good. It's one of the most commercially sensible things you can do, and the numbers back that up far more than most leadership teams seem to realise.
The cost of getting it wrong is bigger than people think. Research from Oxford Economics puts the average cost of losing and replacing an employee earning £25,000 or more at roughly £30,614 once you account for recruitment, lost productivity, and the time it takes someone new to get up to speed. Other estimates put it even higher, commonly 6 to 9 months of that person's salary, gone, just to end up back where you started with someone new still learning the ropes. Multiply that across a team with a genuine churn problem and it stops being an HR statistic and starts being a line on the P&L that someone should be very uncomfortable about.
So no - this isn't a "be nice for the sake of it" post. It's a "the maths only works if you treat people properly" post, and there's an important difference.
Because the flip side matters just as much: kindness without structure isn't a culture, it's chaos. People still need clear goals, honest feedback, and to know what's expected of them. Being a soft touch isn't the same as being a good employer - if anything, a team without clarity is just as likely to lose good people as a team that's outright badly run, because good people want to know what "doing well" actually looks like. The businesses that get this right hold both at once: real care for the person, and real clarity about the job. One without the other doesn't work.
And this is where I'll say something that might ruffle a few feathers: 20 days' annual leave is not a benefit. The UK statutory minimum is actually 28 days (5.6 weeks) for a full-time employee - and employers can count bank holidays towards that if they choose to. So if you're advertising "20 days plus bank holidays," you're not offering a perk. You're sitting exactly on the legal floor and calling it a selling point. Candidates increasingly know the difference, and if you want the best people rather than whoever's left after everyone else has hired, the bar has moved. It's a small, very fixable example of a bigger pattern: businesses that quietly assume the bare minimum still counts as competitive.
This is a lot of why I ended up focused on operations and people as part of what I do, not just the buildings and contracts side of facilities. A review of your processes means nothing if the people running them are burnt out, unclear on their role, or quietly job-hunting because the basics aren't there. Get the people side right with clear expectations, genuine care, benefits that actually reflect what "good" looks like now - and everything downstream gets easier, including the bit where you stop losing your best people to somewhere that worked this out sooner.
If any of this struck a nerve about your own team, that's usually a good sign it's worth a proper look. Happy to talk it through.
If you read this and quietly thought "oh no, that's us" - take a breath, you're not the first and you won't be the last. Drop me a message and let's have a chat about it, kettle on, no sales pitch in sight.
Sources: Oxford Economics — cost of employee turnover, GOV.UK — Holiday entitlement