How to Build a Company Culture Employees Will Move Cities to Join

Last updated: June 2026

To build a company culture people will move cities to join, stop treating culture as a perk programme and start building the conditions beneath it. Clear values that govern real decisions, vulnerability-based trust, psychological safety, meaningful work, honest conflict, fair pay, and leaders who model all of it on an ordinary Tuesday. Culture is the result of those conditions, never the project itself.

The people you most want on your team are not looking for a job. They are looking for a place worth belonging to.

When someone packs up their house, asks their partner to leave their own work, pulls their kids out of school, and moves to a new city for a role, something remarkable has happened. That person did not just accept an offer. They made a decision about the kind of life they want to live and the kind of work they want to pour it into.

The salary is almost never the reason. The culture is.

Most leaders know this in theory. Very few have built the kind of culture that actually earns that decision. Not because they lack the intention, but because they are working on the wrong things. They are polishing the perks list when the real work is happening three layers deeper.

The timing matters too. As of Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, only about one in five employees worldwide are engaged at work, the lowest level since 2020, and Gallup estimates the cost of that disengagement at roughly ten trillion dollars in lost productivity, close to nine per cent of global GDP.

Around forty per cent of employees report a lot of daily stress, and roughly half are watching for or actively seeking a new role. In a market where that many good people are quietly looking, the organisations with real culture are the ones who get the pick of them.

This guide is the most complete resource I can write on the subject. It covers what those deeper layers actually look like, the systems that hold them in place, and exactly how to start. It is long on purpose, because building a culture worth uprooting a life for is not a single move. It is a standard you set and then recommit to every time a decision tests it.

I am Jonno White. I am a leadership consultant, keynote speaker, and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold). I spend most of my working life inside leadership teams that are trying to do exactly what this guide describes. If you want a thinking partner for any of it, you can reach me at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why "Great Culture" Is the Wrong Goal to Start With

Chasing great culture directly is like chasing happiness directly. You pursue the feeling rather than the conditions that produce it, and you end up with neither. Culture is not the thing you build. Culture is the thing that forms when you build other things well.

Most organisations aim for great culture the way people aim for a beach body in January. They want the result without the work that produces it, and they reach for the visible shortcuts. Team days, merchandise, a wall of values, a new Slack channel for wins.

None of these is harmful. None of them builds a culture either.

Here is what most leaders miss. When you get the right people in the right seats, when trust exists not as a value on a wall but as a daily practice, when conflict is productive rather than avoided, when every person knows why their work matters, culture arrives as a consequence. The organisations I have seen people genuinely relocate for are never the ones with the most elaborate culture programmes. They are the ones where the work feels important, the leadership feels honest, and the team feels like the kind of people you want beside you in a hard moment.

The trap is seductive. Leaders add culture initiatives on top of a leadership environment that has not changed. New values, new rituals, new perks.

The underlying team dynamics stay exactly the same. People feel the gap between what is promised and what is real, and that gap is the most expensive thing in your organisation. It costs you the very people perceptive enough to notice it.

So start here. Not with what culture you want. With what conditions you are willing to build and sustain. The rest of this guide is those conditions, in the order I would tackle them.

What People Actually Move Cities For: The Whole-Life Decision

A person does not relocate for a role. They relocate for a life. The job is the anchor of the decision, but the decision itself is about everything around the job: a partner's career, a child's school, proximity to family, the cost and feel of a city, and a quiet question about whether this is the kind of organisation worth building a life around.

This is the part most employers underestimate. When a homeowner relocates, the all-in cost of that move can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and roughly two thirds of people who relocate for work receive some form of relocation support, which tells you it is a real and recognised cost.

The Allied job relocation research, drawn from a survey of a thousand adults who had moved for work, found the most common reason was career advancement or better money, but the second most common was being closer to the people they love. Money gets people to the table. Life decides whether they stay there.

Here is the uncomfortable statistic for anyone who thinks the move ends at the moving truck. A significant share of relocations, by some estimates up to around forty per cent, end in early departure or are considered failures, often because of culture shock and the difficulty of settling in, not because the job itself was wrong. The person arrived, the work was fine, and the life around it never took. They were recruited successfully and welcomed poorly.

There is also a generational shift you cannot ignore. Deloitte's recent research on younger workers found that only a small minority now aspire to climb the traditional corporate ladder, with most prioritising balance, flexibility, and meaning over title and salary. The old relocation pitch, more money and more seniority, is losing its pull. The pitch that works now is a better life, a better team, and work that matters, in a place they would choose to live anyway.

What this means for you is simple and demanding. The culture you are selling to a relocating candidate is not just what happens between nine and five. It is the whole offer of a life. The rest of this guide builds the inside of that offer, and one later section deals directly with the move itself, because the relocation experience is the first cultural moment a new person actually lives through.

Define What You Actually Stand For (Not What Sounds Good)

Values that cannot get you into trouble are not values. They are decoration. The test of a real value is simple: when has it cost you something? When have you lost a client, passed on revenue, or made an uncomfortable hiring decision because of a value you hold?

Every organisation has values on a wall. Almost none of them govern actual decisions. If you cannot name a specific moment in the last ninety days where a value shaped a real choice with a real cost, the value is aspirational, not operational.

And aspirational values do not attract people willing to move cities. They attract people who have not yet discovered the gap between what you say and what you do.

There is a values audit that actually works, and it takes about an hour. First, write your current values exactly as they appear in your documentation. Second, for each value, name a decision it governed in the last ninety days, a real decision with a real trade-off.

If you cannot name one, that value is not yet operational. Third, ask your team the same question privately, because the gap between your list and their list tells you everything about the current culture reality.

Then comes the honest part. Identify the one or two values that already govern decisions without effort. Those are your real values, and you build from them.

Retire the values that are purely decorative, because a small number of true values will always outperform a long list of aspirational ones. Three values you live beat seven you laminate.

This matters more than it looks during recruitment. When a candidate asks what you stand for, they are not asking for your values statement. They are watching how you answer.

The hesitation, the reach for the language on the website, the pivot to perks. A perceptive person can tell within thirty seconds whether the values are lived or laminated. Your next step is to run this audit before you write another word about culture, because the honest list of what you actually stand for is the foundation everything else sits on.

Build Vulnerability-Based Trust as the Foundation

Before psychological safety, before healthy conflict, before accountability, there is trust. Not the predictive trust of knowing someone will deliver, but the deeper kind Patrick Lencioni describes in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: vulnerability-based trust, where people are willing to be genuinely open about their weaknesses, mistakes, and need for help.

This is the base of the pyramid for a reason. A team without it spends enormous energy managing impressions. People protect their reputations instead of pursuing the best outcome.

They withhold the question that would have saved a month, hide the error that would have been cheap to fix early, and nod along with a plan they privately doubt. The cost is invisible until it is catastrophic.

Vulnerability-based trust is not oversharing and it is not a confessional culture moment. It is the ordinary, repeated willingness to say "I do not know," "I got that wrong," and "I need help with this." It compounds slowly and breaks quickly. One leader who punishes a moment of honesty can undo months of careful trust-building, because everyone in the room recalibrates instantly.

The leader builds it by going first, again and again. When the most senior person in the room names their own limitation without it becoming a crisis, they give everyone else permission to do the same.

This is precisely the work I do when I facilitate executive team offsites. The trust exercises are not warm-up games. They are the load-bearing foundation that makes every later conversation about conflict, accountability, and results actually possible.

If your team has skipped this layer and gone straight to performance management and accountability frameworks, you have built a house on sand. Go back and lay the foundation. Trust is not a soft prerequisite to the real work. It is the real work.

Build Psychological Safety Before You Ask for Anything Else

You cannot build a culture worth moving for on a team where people are managing up rather than thinking clearly. Psychological safety, the shared belief that you can speak up, ask a question, admit a mistake, or challenge an idea without being punished or humiliated, is the single most reliable predictor of how a team actually performs.

This is not a soft claim. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term team psychological safety in 1999 and was later named the world's leading management thinker, has spent more than two decades demonstrating it.

When Google ran Project Aristotle, studying around a hundred and eighty of its own teams over two years to find what made the best ones work, they expected the answer to be about who was on the team. Instead, the strongest predictor of effectiveness was psychological safety, ahead of talent, seniority, and individual brilliance. How the team felt about taking interpersonal risks mattered more than who was in the room.

It is also more fragile and more common in its absence than leaders assume. Edmondson's research with James Detert found that around eighty-five per cent of employees had, at least once, withheld something important from a manager because they were afraid of the consequences of speaking up.

That silence is where failed projects, missed risks, and preventable errors live. The absence of bad news is not evidence of health. It usually means you are not hearing about it.

Here is what psychological safety actually looks like in the room. People disagree with the leader's idea in the meeting, not in the car park afterwards. When something goes wrong, the first conversation is about the system, not the person.

Someone new asks a question that should be obvious and no one flinches. A senior person says "I was wrong about that" without it becoming an event. The quietest person has as much airtime as the loudest one when it matters.

One important correction, because this is where well-meaning leaders get it wrong. Psychological safety is not niceness, and it is not comfort. Edmondson is precise that safety must be paired with high standards and real accountability.

Safety without standards produces a pleasant team that achieves very little. Safety with high standards produces a team that can have the hard conversation and still like each other on Monday.

The single practice that builds it faster than any other is modelling vulnerability from the top, which is why the previous section comes first. Notice, too, the moments in your next team meeting where someone starts to say something and then pulls back. That pull-back is data.

It tells you exactly how safe the room feels, and most leaders miss it because they are running the agenda instead of reading the room. Talented people with options do not leave teams like that loudly. They start performing the role instead of inhabiting it, and the best version of them is gone months before they hand in notice.

Make the Work Itself Meaningful, Not Just the Mission

The mission can be extraordinary and the work can still be soul-destroying. These are not the same thing, and the distance between them is where disengagement lives.

Most leaders conflate mission and meaning. They assume that because the organisation is doing important work, every person inside it feels the importance of their own contribution. They are wrong.

Consider a team in a nonprofit doing genuinely world-changing work. The mission is compelling and the leader is passionate, but three layers down, a project manager is running the same reporting cycle she has run for four years, reporting to someone who does not really understand what she does, with no line of sight from her output to the outcomes the organisation talks about. She is not disengaged because the mission is weak. She is disengaged because the bridge between her daily work and that mission was never built.

There are three connections every team member needs, and a leader's job is to build all three. The first is task to outcome. Every person should be able to say, in their own words, how their daily work produces a result that matters. If they cannot, you have not built the bridge, and you build it with them, not for them.

The second is outcome to people. Abstract outcomes motivate far less than specific people. "We improved the enrolment process" lands differently than "we made the first week easier for two hundred students who were already nervous." Name the human beings on the other end of the work.

The third is person to progress. People stay where they can see themselves growing, not only in title but in capability, confidence, and contribution. If a team member cannot name something they are getting better at right now, they are not growing inside your culture. They are waiting to grow somewhere else.

This is also where putting people in the right seat changes everything. The Working Genius framework, created by Patrick Lencioni and which I am certified to facilitate, maps the kinds of work that energise a person against the kinds that drain them.

When someone spends most of their week in work that drains them, no mission statement will rescue their engagement. Reassign the work to match the genius, and meaning often returns without anyone changing jobs. Run this simple test in your next one on one: ask your team member to connect their last week of work to someone who is better off because of it. If they struggle, the work is not the problem. The visibility is.

Handle Conflict Like It Belongs in the Building

The organisations people move for are not the ones without conflict. They are the ones where conflict is handled well. This is perhaps the single biggest misunderstanding in culture building, and it is the one I have written an entire book about.

Leaders consistently confuse a harmonious culture with a conflict-free one. They are not the same. A conflict-free culture is almost always a culture of suppression, where tension lives beneath the surface and gets managed through avoidance. That suppression costs you every good idea that never got challenged, every bad decision nobody pushed back on, and every talented person who left because they could not stomach the pretending any longer.

It helps to separate the four kinds of conflict, because each needs a different response. The first is productive disagreement about ideas. This is the kind that makes organisations better, and it should be encouraged, structured, and protected.

The leader's job is to make it safe enough to happen and productive enough to reach a decision. The second is tension from role ambiguity, where two people clash because neither is clear on who owns what. That conflict is a symptom, not the problem. Clarify the roles and the tension usually resolves on its own.

The third is values misalignment, where someone's behaviour is consistently at odds with what the organisation stands for. No amount of conflict resolution fixes that. It is a selection or development problem, and you address the underlying cause.

The fourth, and most expensive, is interpersonal conflict between senior people. Two senior leaders who cannot work with each other cost you in productivity, in the energy everyone spends managing around them, and in the signal it sends to everyone who watches the situation continue without resolution.

The reason this is so hard is that healthy conflict requires the trust and safety from the two sections above. Without vulnerability-based trust, people will not risk disagreement, and what looks like harmony is just fear wearing a polite face. This is the heart of Step Up or Step Out, my book on having the difficult conversations most leaders avoid, which you can find on Amazon. Most accountability problems are really avoided-conversation problems, and most avoided conversations trace back to a leader who has not built the conditions that make honesty survivable.

Try this. Name the conflict in your organisation that has been present for more than six months and has not been directly addressed. That conflict is costing you more than you think, and the people who most want to leave are almost always the ones who can see it most clearly.

If you want help building a team that can disagree well, this is exactly what I run executive offsites and keynotes to do. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Build a Culture of Feedback That Actually Works

Feedback cultures that work are not the ones where feedback is frequent. They are the ones where feedback is safe. Most organisations invest in feedback systems and see almost no change in feedback behaviour, because the system landed before the safety did.

Feedback tools in a low-trust environment do not produce feedback. They produce carefully managed self-presentation.

Several conditions have to be in place for honest feedback to flow. The leader goes first, every time, asking for feedback, receiving it visibly without defensiveness, and thanking the person who gave it, until it becomes the norm rather than the exception. Feedback is kept structurally separate from performance evaluation, because the moment people believe that giving feedback will affect how they are assessed, they stop giving honest feedback.

The direction of the spotlight matters too. Positive feedback works best when it is specific and public, because generic praise like "great work everyone" quietly devalues the whole feedback culture, while specific, named recognition teaches the team what valued behaviour actually looks like. Critical feedback works best when it is specific and private, because public criticism, even when accurate, teaches everyone that the room is not safe.

But the single thing that matters most is what happens after the feedback. When someone offers feedback and nothing changes, they learn that feedback is theatre. Every piece of feedback deserves either a visible response or an honest explanation of why it cannot be acted on right now.

A feedback culture worth moving for is not one where everyone says nice things. It is one where honest things can be said without cost, and where saying them visibly changes something. Build that, and the feedback software is almost redundant.

Hire for Cultural Contribution, Not Cultural Fit

Hiring for cultural fit is how good cultures stop growing and mediocre ones never start. Cultural fit, as most organisations practise it, is a polite way of saying "people who are like us." The problem is that sameness is not a culture. It is a comfort zone with a logo.

The organisations people move cities to join are not homogeneous. They are coherent, and there is a meaningful difference. Fit asks whether a person will blend in. Contribution asks whether they will make the team better.

Fit selects for similarity, while contribution selects for shared values with different strengths. Fit produces a team that agrees, while contribution produces a team that decides well. Fit feels comfortable in the interview, while contribution sometimes feels challenging, and that tension is exactly the point.

The question that replaces "will they fit?" is "what will this person bring that we do not already have?" Not in technical skill, but in perspective, experience, working style, and way of thinking about problems. This is where a strengths-based lens pays off. Tools like the Working Genius framework, DISC, and StrengthsFinder, all of which I run as workshops, let you hire for genuine complementarity rather than vague chemistry. You stop building a team of people who think the same way and start building one with the full range of geniuses a real piece of work requires.

Here is what most hiring panels get wrong. They evaluate candidates on how comfortable the conversation felt, and comfort is not a measure of contribution. Some of the most valuable people you will ever hire feel slightly uncomfortable in the interview because they are thinking differently from everyone in the room.

That discomfort is not a warning sign. It is the signal. Design your process to surface values alignment and strength diversity at the same time, and you will stop building a team that agrees and start building one that thrives.

Make Onboarding the First Chapter, Not the Orientation

The first ninety days tell a new hire everything they need to know about whether they made the right decision. For someone who moved cities to join you, those ninety days carry even more weight, because they did not just take a new job. They made a significant and costly act of trust, betting that your culture is what it appeared to be during the process.

That trust is either validated or quietly eroded in the early weeks, and the erosion is almost always silent. It is a slow accumulation of small moments where the reality and the promise do not quite match, until one day the person realises they are not where they thought they were going. Given that a meaningful share of relocations fail in the early period because the person never settles, onboarding is not an administrative formality. It is retention insurance on your most expensive hires.

A few elements actually matter. The first week should feel like the organisation has been waiting for this specific person, not like a generic induction any new hire cycles through. New hires need a clear picture of what success looks like in the first ninety days, not a list of tasks but an understanding of what good looks like and why it matters, because people who know what they are working toward integrate faster and contribute sooner. They need early access to the real culture, the rituals, the language, the inside stories and moments of history that make a person feel like they belong rather than like they are observing from outside.

They also need a structured relationship with their manager through the first month, not a fortnightly meeting but a genuine ongoing conversation that checks how the reality compares to the expectation and closes the gaps before they become grievances. And they need a clear signal that their perspective is wanted.

Ask new hires within the first month what they have noticed that the existing team might have stopped seeing, because fresh eyes are genuinely valuable and the question itself tells them their view matters. Get this right and you deepen the commitment of someone who already moved their life for you. Get it wrong and you start the countdown to an extraordinarily expensive departure.

Build a Development Culture That Actually Develops People

The best people do not stay where they stop growing. Growth is not a perk. It is oxygen.

Most organisations have a development programme, but very few have a development culture, and the difference is not budget or content. It is whether growth happens by design or by accident.

A development programme is a set of scheduled events. A development culture is an environment where learning is embedded in the daily work and expected of everyone, including the most senior people in the building. That last point is the one leaders skip. If the most senior people have visibly stopped developing, they signal that growth is for junior staff, while a leader who talks openly about a book they are wrestling with or a conversation that changed their thinking gives everyone permission to stay curious.

The most powerful development vehicle is not training. It is the stretch assignment. Training events transfer information, but stretch assignments build capability, and the most useful question a manager can ask is not "what training do you need?" but "what challenge should we put you on next?" Put people on problems slightly beyond their current capability and support them through the difficulty. Failure has to be treated as curriculum rather than crime, because an organisation where people fear failure is one where people stop trying the experiments that produce real growth.

There is a generational urgency to this. Recent research on younger workers shows they prioritise growth, development, and meaning well ahead of title and pay, and they leave quickly when those things stall. A culture that discusses growth only at the annual review has already lost the people most committed to their own development.

Those people need a real conversation about their trajectory at least quarterly. Try asking your team members what they are getting better at right now. The quality of the answer is the quality of your development culture.

Build Real Career Pathways and Internal Mobility

People will move cities for the next step in their growth, and they will leave a great culture the moment that next step disappears. Development without a path is a treadmill. It feels like effort without going anywhere, and your most ambitious people are the first to notice.

Career pathways are different from promotions. A promotion is a single event. A pathway is a visible map of where a person could go, what capability each step requires, and how this organisation will help them build it. The absence of that map is one of the quiet reasons good people leave, often citing better opportunity elsewhere when what they really mean is that they could not see the opportunity here.

Internal mobility is the engine that makes pathways real. The organisations that retain talent treat their own people as the first candidates for new and bigger roles, sometimes across functions, not only up a single ladder. This matters even more in flatter organisations where vertical promotions are rare. When the ladder is short, growth has to come laterally, through scope, mastery, and influence, and that has to be named explicitly so people do not mistake a flat structure for a dead end.

The relocation angle here is direct. A person weighing a move to your city is not only asking whether they want this job. They are asking whether this organisation is somewhere a career can compound over five or ten years.

Show them the map. Show them the people who joined where they are now and where those people are today. A credible pathway is one of the strongest reasons a talented person will choose to build a life around your organisation rather than treat it as a stepping stone.

Pay People Well Enough That Money Stops Being the Conversation

If people are thinking about their salary, they are not thinking about the work. That is a leadership problem, not a finance problem. Compensation is not a culture strategy, but inadequate compensation quietly destroys every other culture strategy you have.

This is one of the most consistent patterns I see in organisations with high turnover: a genuinely strong culture being slowly eroded by the resentment of people who feel underpaid. They rarely say it loudly. They say it in their decisions, in their level of discretionary effort, and in the conversations they have with their partners at night about whether to stay.

And the numbers are unforgiving. Replacing an employee costs somewhere between half and two times their annual salary, by SHRM and Gallup estimates, and Gallup puts the total cost of turnover to US businesses alone at around one trillion dollars a year. Most striking, Gallup finds that roughly forty-two per cent of employees who left felt their manager or organisation could have done something to keep them. Most turnover is preventable, and underpayment is one of the most preventable causes.

The principle that protects everything else is to pay people enough that salary is never the reason they leave. This does not mean paying above market for every role. It means paying fairly, consistently, and transparently enough that your people never have to wonder whether the person beside them is making significantly more for the same contribution.

Pay transparency is uncomfortable, but it is clarifying. Teams that understand the pay structure, even broadly, spend less energy speculating about fairness and more energy doing the work.

It also helps to remember that total compensation includes things that never appear on a payslip. Autonomy is compensation. Flexibility is compensation. A manager who makes your work easier rather than harder is compensation.

Development that accelerates your career is compensation. When you build the case for why someone should move cities for your role, the full picture matters, not just the number. But make no mistake about the floor: if your compensation strategy relies on people not comparing notes, it needs to change. The organisations worth relocating for do not need secrecy to hold people. They hold people because the full picture is genuinely good.

Create a Leadership Team That Models the Culture Every Single Day

Your team does not listen to what you say about culture. They watch what your leadership team does on a Tuesday afternoon. The culture of an organisation is set, in practice, by the behaviour of its most senior people in moments that are not being managed. Not the all-hands meeting and not the culture day, but the unscripted moment when two senior leaders disagree and everyone in earshot watches how they handle it.

A handful of cultural moments matter more than all the messaging combined. How conflict is handled at the top sets the tone for every layer below, because if senior leaders avoid conflict, everyone learns to avoid it, and if they handle it directly and without drama, that cascades down. How failure is treated at the top defines the appetite for risk across the whole organisation, because people watch whether a senior leader's failed initiative gets an honest post-mortem or quietly disappears.

How credit is allocated builds either a culture of generosity or one of self-protection. Leaders who consistently give credit to their teams by name and in public create the first. Leaders who absorb credit upward create the second, and people always know which world they are living in. How hard conversations are had sends a signal too, because a senior leader who avoids an uncomfortable conversation for three months teaches every manager that avoidance is acceptable here.

The most corrosive one is how decisions get made. If the real decisions happen in the meeting after the meeting rather than in the room, people learn that the official process is theatre, and that realisation kills psychological safety faster than almost anything else. Try watching your leadership team for one week not as a participant but as an observer, noting every moment where their behaviour taught the organisation something about what is acceptable here. The list you produce is your actual culture, regardless of what is written anywhere.

Fix the Frozen Middle: Your Managers Are Your Culture

For most of your people, the culture is not the founder's vision or the values on the website. The culture is their manager. The everyday experience of work, whether it is safe to speak up, whether good work is noticed, whether the load is sustainable, is delivered almost entirely by the person they report to.

Get the manager layer right and culture flows. Get it wrong and no amount of executive intent reaches the people who matter.

The data on this is hard to argue with. Gallup attributes roughly seventy per cent of the variance in team engagement to the manager. The manager is not one factor among many.

The manager is the lever. And right now that lever is under enormous strain. Gallup's 2026 figures show manager engagement falling from twenty-seven per cent to twenty-two per cent in a single year, the steepest drop of any group, as managers absorb shrinking budgets, restructures, rising expectations, and the pressure of new technology, often without the training or support to cope.

That last gap is the opportunity. Across the world, fewer than half of managers have received any real management training, yet the evidence suggests that training roughly halves active disengagement on their teams and that managers coached in the right behaviours produce meaningful gains in performance and engagement.

Most people are promoted into management for being good at the previous job, then left to figure out the hardest part, leading humans, entirely on their own. The frozen middle is not frozen because managers are weak. It is frozen because no one ever taught them how to thaw it.

If you want a culture people will relocate for, invest in the layer that delivers it daily. That means selecting managers for the right reasons, training them properly, and protecting their own wellbeing so they have something left to give their teams. Developing middle managers is one of the most common reasons organisations bring me in, because it is the highest-leverage culture investment most of them are not making. If that is your gap, email me at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Make Decisions in the Open and Communicate Relentlessly

Nothing erodes a culture faster than the sense that the real decisions are being made somewhere you are not. When people cannot see how or why decisions happen, they fill the silence with rumour, and rumour is almost always worse than the truth. A culture worth moving for is one where decisions are visible, the reasoning is shared, and information flows toward people rather than being hoarded above them.

There is a simple distinction that separates strong cultures from weak ones. In a strong culture, the real decision is made in the room, with the people affected by it present and able to influence it. In a weak culture, the room is theatre and the real decision is made afterwards, in private, by a smaller group. Teams are remarkably good at sensing which one they are in, and the moment they conclude the official process is a performance, they stop investing in it.

Communication is the other half. Employees consistently say they would rather hear difficult news than be kept in the dark, and they reward honesty with commitment. Regular, transparent communication from senior leaders, through whatever rhythm fits your organisation, is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to lift engagement. Even sharing bad news openly beats silence, because silence gets filled with the worst possible interpretation.

This connects directly to relocation. A candidate considering a move is trying to read whether they can trust your organisation with their life decision. Transparency in how you communicate during the hiring process is a preview of how you will communicate once they have moved.

If the information flow is generous and honest before they sign, they have good reason to believe it will be afterwards. If it is guarded and vague, the most perceptive candidates, the ones you most want, will quietly walk away.

Design for Belonging, Not Just Inclusion

Inclusion means being invited to the table. Belonging means the table changes because you are there. Most organisations are genuinely trying to be inclusive, working much harder at the invitation than at what happens after the person arrives.

Someone from a different background, working style, or life experience can be successfully recruited and then slowly realise that the culture was designed for someone who is not them. The invitation was real. The belonging was not.

Belonging shows up in a few concrete ways. People can bring their real working style rather than a performance of the acceptable one. Some think best in quiet, some need to talk an idea through before they know what they think, and some are brilliant in writing but hesitant in real time. A culture of belonging designs for the full range, not just for the fast-talking, extroverted style that tends to dominate meetings.

Different perspectives actually change outcomes, not just conversations. The real measure of belonging is not whether diverse perspectives are heard. It is whether they change decisions. If the same decisions would have been made without those perspectives in the room, inclusion is present but belonging is not.

The hardest test is whether people can disagree with the culture itself without risking their place in it. A truly belonging culture lets people push back on the norms, question the rituals, and name what is not working without it costing them their standing. This is rare, and it is also exactly what makes people stay.

Try this: ask three people who joined in the last eighteen months what they have stopped doing or saying since they arrived that they used to do in previous roles. The answer tells you what your culture has quietly asked them to hide.

Protect Wellbeing and a Sustainable Pace

You cannot ask a person to move their entire family into a burnout machine and expect them to stay. A culture that runs on chronic overwork might attract people in a hot moment, but it cannot hold the kind of person who has thought carefully about the life they want. Wellbeing is not a wellness perk. It is whether the pace of work is survivable over years, not just sprints.

The scale of the problem is stark. Gallup's recent data shows around forty per cent of employees experiencing a lot of stress on any given day, with managers reporting some of the steepest declines in wellbeing of any group. Burnout is not simply being tired.

It is a sustained state of stress that leaves people emotionally drained, cynical, and less effective, and it is one of the most reliable predictors of both disengagement and exit. When your best people burn out, you do not just lose their energy. You eventually lose them.

A sustainable culture treats pace as a design choice rather than an accident. It means leaders model recovery instead of glorifying exhaustion, because a leader who emails at midnight and praises the people who reply is building a culture nobody can stay in for a decade. It means workloads are matched to capacity rather than quietly inflated every time someone leaves and is not replaced. It means flexibility is real, not theoretical, so people can build a life around their work instead of squeezing their life into its gaps.

This is also where wellbeing and the relocation decision meet. A person evaluating a move is asking whether this is somewhere they can build a whole life, raise a family, and stay healthy. A reputation for grinding people down travels fast, and it is poison to the kind of recruitment this guide is about.

The organisations people relocate for are demanding, but they are demanding in a way that is sustainable. They expect a lot and they make it possible to give a lot for a long time.

Create Rituals That Carry the Culture Forward

Culture without ritual is a set of good intentions waiting to be forgotten. Rituals are the mechanism by which culture transmits from one month to the next, from the founding team to the hundredth hire. Without them, the culture exists only as long as the people who built it are in the room, and the moment those people leave or the team outgrows everyone knowing everyone, the culture begins to drift.

The rituals that actually work share a few traits. They are short enough to actually happen, because a ritual that takes an hour a week gets cut the first time the schedule tightens, while a five-minute ritual survives. Design for the difficult quarter, not the easy one. They connect back to a value you hold, because a ritual disconnected from a value is just another meeting, and the best ones make the link explicit: we do this because we believe that.

They also need a keeper, someone whose job it is to protect the ritual, because the urgent always crowds out the important and someone has to be the person who says "we are doing this today" when everyone is tempted to skip it. They evolve without disappearing, changing shape as the organisation changes while keeping their underlying purpose intact. And the best of them tell a story about who you are, the kind of thing new people hear about before they join and look forward to experiencing.

Here is a simple measure. Imagine a new team member arrives in their second week and asks what the things are that you always do here. The richness of the answer is a direct measure of how much deliberate culture building has happened. The organisations that people move cities for always have a rich answer.

Recognise and Celebrate in Ways People Actually Feel

People do not leave organisations where their best work is consistently seen. Recognition is one of the cheapest and most underused levers in culture, and most leaders get it wrong by making it generic, infrequent, and disconnected from the work that actually mattered.

Recognition that lands is specific. "Great job, team" costs nothing and means nothing. "The way you restructured that onboarding process cut a week off every new hire's ramp-up, and you did it without being asked" tells the individual they were truly seen and teaches everyone else exactly what excellent looks like here. Specific recognition is a teaching tool disguised as a thank you, because it makes the standard visible in a way no policy document ever could.

It also has to be regular rather than ceremonial. An annual awards night does not build a recognition culture. A consistent habit of noticing good work in the ordinary flow of the week does. The most durable recognition is woven into how the team operates, not reserved for a stage once a year, and it costs a manager nothing but attention.

There is a deeper point underneath this. Recognition is one of the clearest expressions of whether an organisation actually values its people or merely uses them. When someone has uprooted their life to join you, being genuinely seen for their contribution is part of what tells them the move was worth it. A culture that celebrates the right things, in the right way, at the right cadence, is a culture people are reluctant to leave.

Make the Relocation Itself a Statement of Culture

The move is the first cultural experience a relocating employee actually lives through. Long before they feel your values in a meeting, they feel them in how you handled their relocation. Treat the move as a logistics problem to be minimised and you have already told them something about the culture. Treat it as the beginning of a relationship and you have told them something better.

This is where most organisations underinvest, and it is precisely where the early-departure failures come from. Recall that a large share of relocations fail not because the job was wrong but because the person and their family never settled. The work was fine.

The life around it never took. That is an avoidable, expensive outcome, and it is avoidable through the one thing most employers skip: supporting the whole life, not just the role.

Supporting the whole life means taking the parts of the move that have nothing to do with the job seriously. It means practical help with housing and the settling-in period rather than a cheque and a handshake. It means recognising that a partner often has to leave their own work, and that helping that partner find their footing in the new city is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for retention, because a relocated employee with an unhappy, unemployed partner is an employee already half out the door. It means caring about schools, community, and the texture of life in the new place, because those are the things the family is actually deciding on.

Done well, the relocation becomes a powerful proof of culture. The new person arrives already believing the organisation does what it says, because it has just demonstrated it during the most stressful logistics of their year.

Done poorly, it plants the first seed of doubt before they have even started. If you are serious about being the kind of organisation people will move cities for, design the move itself with the same care you would give a major client. It is, after all, the first promise you keep.

Build Culture That Works Across Distance

The phrase "move cities" sits in an interesting tension with the modern reality of distributed work. For many roles, location is now negotiable, and that changes the relocation question rather than removing it. Some people will still move because place and presence matter to them.

Others will only consider a role if it offers genuine flexibility. A culture worth joining has to work for both, and that means being deliberate about distance rather than defaulting to it.

Psychological safety, trust, and belonging do not transmit automatically across a screen. Amy Edmondson's own observations on distributed work are useful here: the more uncertain, creative, and generative the work, the more it benefits from being together in person, while routine check-ins and familiar one-on-one conversations work perfectly well remotely. The implication is not "everyone back to the office" or "fully remote forever." It is to be intentional about which work genuinely needs presence and which does not, and to design the rhythm around that rather than around habit or control.

Distance also amplifies loneliness, which is already a significant and rising problem at work, and remote workers feel it more acutely. A culture that scatters its people without deliberately building connection ends up with a collection of individuals rather than a team. The rituals, recognition, and communication rhythms described earlier in this guide are not optional extras in a distributed organisation. They are the connective tissue that has to be built consciously because proximity is no longer doing it for free.

For the relocation question specifically, flexibility and place are not opposites. The strongest offer to a person weighing a move is often a hybrid one: a real city, a real team to be physically part of when it matters, and genuine flexibility around the rest. That combination respects both the people for whom place is part of the appeal and the people for whom flexibility is non-negotiable. Build a culture that holds together across distance, and you widen the pool of people who can imagine building a life around your organisation.

Measure What the Culture Actually Is, Not What You Hope It Is

Culture without honest measurement is a story you tell yourself, and the people most affected by the gap know the difference. Most leaders have an approximate sense of their culture, usually based on what they see from the front, which is the version people perform when the leader is watching. The actual culture lives in the version people show when the leader is not in the room.

A handful of measurement approaches produce honest data. Anonymous pulse surveys, run quarterly with short and consistent questions, give you a trend over time, and the value is in the movement rather than any single data point. Stay interviews, where you ask your best people regularly what would make them leave and what is making them stay, produce more actionable insight than any exit interview because the person is still there and you can still act. Exit interviews conducted by someone other than the direct manager get closer to the truth, because people are honest about why they are leaving with people they are not worried about affecting.

There is also the observation audit, which costs nothing but courage. Spend a week in meetings you do not normally attend and notice what happens when decisions are made without you present, how conflict is handled, and what gets laughed about versus whispered about. The distance between what you observe and what you believe is the measure of your culture gap. And track referral rates from your own team, because whether your people actively refer those they respect to come and work with them is one of the most reliable signals of a strong culture.

One caution worth naming. Engagement scores are useful but increasingly insufficient on their own, and even Gallup's data shows the relationship between engagement and performance is more complex than a single number suggests. Measure the underlying conditions this guide describes, not just the mood. The organisations people move for are almost always led by people honest enough to look at the data even when it is uncomfortable, because the discomfort of honest measurement is always smaller than the cost of not knowing.

Build a Reputation That Precedes You

The culture that attracts people who will move cities for it is not one that is marketed. It is one that is talked about. By the time someone is seriously considering relocating for a role, they have almost certainly done research well beyond your website and job listing.

They have spoken to people who work there or used to, read what is available, and asked their network, piecing together a picture of what it is actually like inside your organisation. That picture either matches what you are presenting or it does not.

A few reputation levers do the real work. The experience of former employees matters enormously, because people who left on good terms and speak well of you are among your most valuable culture assets, while people who left with a grievance are working against you in conversations you will never hear. The stories your current team tells matter too. Ask your people what they say when someone asks what it is like to work there, because the specificity and warmth of those answers is your reputation, and if they hesitate or pivot to the products, the culture has not yet produced stories worth telling.

The visible behaviour of your leaders in public spaces contributes, in how they treat people at industry events and conduct themselves where they are not being formally observed. And your response to adversity tells the market more than any deliberate messaging, because how an organisation behaves when things go wrong, when a person is struggling, or when a public challenge arises is what makes observers think they want to work somewhere like that.

The reputation you build is simply the culture you have, reported by the people who have experienced it. There is no shortcut and no substitute. The most powerful culture marketing strategy in the world is to make the experience so good that people cannot stop talking about it.

Protect Culture Through Growth and Scale

The culture that gets you to twenty people will not survive to two hundred unless you protect it deliberately. Growth is the most common way strong cultures quietly die, not through a single decision but through dilution, as each wave of new hires arrives a little further from the founding intent and a little more reliant on whatever the current managers happen to model.

In a small team, culture transmits by osmosis. Everyone knows everyone, the founders are in most rooms, and the standard is visible in real time. None of that scales. Past a certain size, no one can know everyone, the founders are in a fraction of the rooms, and the culture is carried entirely by the systems and the managers described throughout this guide. This is why the foundational work matters so much. A culture held together only by the personalities of a few people is one departure away from drift.

Protecting culture through scale means being explicit about the things that used to be implicit. The values that everyone simply understood have to be written down and made operational. The rituals that happened naturally have to be designed and given keepers.

The hiring instinct that one founder could trust has to become a shared, teachable process so that the hundredth hire is selected with the same care as the third. Onboarding has to carry the culture deliberately, because new people can no longer absorb it from the air.

For an organisation actively recruiting people to relocate, scale and culture intersect sharply. Rapid growth is often exactly when you are hiring hardest and when culture is most at risk, which means the move-worthy culture you sold to a candidate has to survive the very growth their arrival is part of. The organisations that manage this are the ones that treated culture as infrastructure early, rather than scrambling to retrofit it once the cracks appeared.

Hold Culture Together Through Change and Crisis

You learn what a culture is really made of when things go wrong. Anyone can sustain good behaviour in a good quarter. The test is a downturn, a restructure, a painful round of departures, or a public failure, and how an organisation behaves in those moments teaches its people more about the real culture than years of stable messaging.

Change is constant and increasingly so, and uncertainty is precisely when the conditions in this guide matter most. Edmondson's research is clear that psychological safety becomes more important, not less, as uncertainty rises, because the more unpredictable the environment, the more you need people speaking up, flagging problems, and generating ideas to navigate through it. A culture that goes quiet and defensive under pressure loses exactly the candour it needs most. The way through is to name the difficulty openly and make it discussable, which puts everyone on the same page rather than leaving them to guess.

How you handle the hardest decisions is where culture is forged or broken. When difficult news has to be delivered, whether layoffs, lost work, or a strategic reversal, the choice between honesty and spin is a defining cultural act. People can absorb hard truths delivered with respect and transparency.

What they cannot forgive is being misled, blindsided, or treated as a cost rather than a person. The organisations whose cultures survive crises are the ones that stay honest when honesty is most expensive.

There is a long tail to this that connects back to reputation. How you treat people on the way out, in a downturn or a restructure, shapes what every remaining person believes about their own future and what every former employee says about you for years. A person considering a move to your organisation is, consciously or not, asking what would happen to them if things got hard. The honest answer to that question is written in how you have behaved in your own hard moments, and the best talent knows to look there.

The Common Mistakes That Quietly Destroy Culture

Even leaders who genuinely care about culture tend to make the same handful of mistakes, and naming them is often the fastest way to stop. The first and most common is building culture on top of an unchanged leadership environment. New values, new rituals, and new perks layered over the same dysfunctional team dynamics produce nothing but a widening gap between the promise and the reality, and that gap is felt most keenly by your most perceptive people.

The second mistake is mistaking harmony for health. A team with no visible conflict is usually not a team that has transcended conflict. It is a team that has buried it, and the cost is every challenge that never happened and every honest objection that stayed silent. The third is confusing engagement activities with engagement, treating culture as a calendar of events rather than a set of daily conditions, so the survey scores nudge upward for a month and then settle back exactly where they were.

The fourth is leaving managers to fend for themselves. Promoting people for technical skill and then expecting them to lead humans with no training is how the frozen middle forms, and since managers account for the majority of the variance in team engagement, this single oversight undoes enormous amounts of executive intent. The fifth is measuring the mood instead of the conditions, watching the engagement number while ignoring whether people actually feel safe to speak, whether the work is meaningful, and whether the pace is sustainable.

The sixth, and the one most relevant to this guide, is recruiting brilliantly and welcoming poorly. Organisations pour energy into landing a relocating hire and then hand them a generic induction and a vague first quarter, and they are genuinely surprised when the person leaves within the year. The move was the easy part. The settling-in was the part that mattered, and it was the part nobody designed.

A Practical Roadmap: Where to Start

You cannot build all of this at once, and trying to is its own mistake. The work sequences naturally, and the order matters because the later layers depend on the earlier ones.

First, the foundation (months one to three)

Start with honesty about where you actually are. Run the values audit from earlier in this guide and find out which of your stated values genuinely govern decisions. At the same time, get an honest read on the current culture through anonymous pulse data, stay interviews with your best people, and a week of simply observing your leadership team as an outsider would.

Resist the urge to fix anything yet. You cannot build toward a destination you have lied to yourself about.

Second, trust and safety (months two to six)

With an honest baseline, begin the foundational relational work, because nothing else holds without it. This is the vulnerability-based trust and psychological safety layer, and it starts with the leadership team, not the wider organisation, because culture cascades from the top. This is the work I most often run as an executive team offsite, precisely because it is hard to do from inside the team and benefits from a skilled outside facilitator. Until the senior team can be honest with each other, asking the rest of the organisation to be honest is asking for something the leaders themselves are not modelling.

Third, the daily systems (months four to twelve)

Once the foundation is real, turn to the systems that carry culture into everyday work. Strengthen the manager layer through proper selection and training, because this is your highest-leverage investment. Rebuild onboarding so it carries the culture rather than processing paperwork.

Make decision-making and communication visibly more transparent. Match workloads to capacity and make flexibility real. These are the mechanisms that translate good intent into daily experience for people who never sit in the leadership room.

Fourth, the ongoing practice (year one and beyond)

Everything after that is recommitment. Honest measurement on a quarterly rhythm, recognition woven into the week, rituals with keepers, career pathways made visible, and the discipline to protect all of it through growth and through the hard moments that will inevitably come. The work never finishes. It becomes the way you operate.

A Culture Self-Assessment

If you want a fast, honest read on where your culture stands, sit with these questions and answer them as your team would, not as you hope they would. When was the last time one of your stated values cost you something real, and can you name the specific decision? In your last team meeting, did anyone disagree with you to your face, and if not, what does that silence tell you?

Can every person on your team explain, in their own words, how their daily work helps a specific human being? What is the conflict in your organisation that has gone unaddressed for more than six months, and what is it quietly costing you? If you asked your three most recent hires what they have stopped saying since they arrived, what would they tell you?

Is the real decision in your organisation made in the room, or in the meeting after the meeting? Would your best people refer someone they respect to come and work here, and have they actually done so recently? And the hardest one: if a talented person were weighing a move across the country to join you, and they spoke to five people who know your organisation from the inside, what would those five people honestly say?

The questions you most want to skip are usually the ones pointing at the work that matters most.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between company culture and company values?

Values are what you say you stand for. Culture is what actually happens when no one is managing the moment. The two only align when your values genuinely govern real decisions with real costs. When they do not, the culture is defined by your everyday behaviour, not by the statement on the wall, and people trust the behaviour every time.

How long does it take to change a company culture?

Meaningful culture change usually takes one to three years, because it depends on changing behaviour and rebuilding trust, not on launching an initiative. You can see early signals within a few months, particularly in how the leadership team behaves, but durable change is the result of consistent action sustained long enough to become the new normal rather than a temporary campaign.

Can you build a strong culture in a remote or hybrid organisation?

Yes, but it has to be deliberate rather than automatic. Trust, safety, and belonging do not transmit across a screen by themselves, so rituals, recognition, and communication rhythms have to be built consciously. Be intentional about which work genuinely needs people together in person, particularly creative and generative work, and design genuine flexibility around the rest.

Is pay or culture more important for keeping good people?

Both, in sequence. Inadequate pay destroys a strong culture through quiet resentment, so fair and transparent compensation is the floor. Above that floor, culture is what keeps people, because money gets someone to the table while meaning, trust, growth, and good leadership are what make them stay. You cannot buy your way out of a poor culture, and you cannot underpay your way into a good one.

What is the single most important thing for building a culture people will relocate for?

Vulnerability-based trust and psychological safety, built first within the leadership team. Almost everything else in this guide depends on people being able to speak honestly without fear, and that capacity has to be modelled from the top before it can spread. Get that foundation right and the rest becomes possible. Skip it and every other initiative sits on sand.

How do you measure company culture?

Through honest data rather than hope. Use anonymous quarterly pulse surveys for the trend, stay interviews with your best people, exit interviews run by someone other than the direct manager, and your own observation of meetings you do not normally attend. Track referral rates from your own team, because whether people actively recommend working with them is one of the most reliable signals of a healthy culture.

Final Thoughts

Building a culture that people will move cities for is not a project with an end date. It is a standard you set and then recommit to every time a decision tests it. The conditions in this guide are not a checklist to complete and archive. They are a set of ongoing practices, each one requiring consistent leadership attention, honest measurement, and the willingness to keep going when the gap between what you aspire to and what currently exists feels discouraging.

The organisations that people relocate for are not mythical. They are built by leaders who decided that the kind of culture they had was not the kind of culture they were willing to keep. Notice the order of the work. Trust and safety first, then meaning and honest conflict, then the people systems and the manager layer, then the human experience of belonging and wellbeing and the move itself, and finally the discipline to measure it, protect it, and hold it together through growth and crisis. Each layer depends on the ones beneath it, which is why the shortcuts never work.

If this guide has named something you recognise in your own organisation, that recognition is the beginning. Pick one section, run the audit or the conversation it suggests, and see what the honest data shows you. The culture you want to build is closer than you think, and it starts with deciding to look at it clearly.

When you are ready to do the work with your team, this is exactly what I help leaders build. I run executive team offsites, Working Genius and DISC workshops, leadership development, and keynotes for schools, corporates, and nonprofits, and I work globally. Many organisations find that flying me in costs less than engaging high-profile local providers, and whether the work is virtual or face to face, the place to start is a conversation. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org and tell me what you are trying to build.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries.

Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

Engagement, manager, stress, and turnover figures: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace (2026 report, covering 2025 data) and Gallup turnover research. Cost-of-turnover ranges: Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). Psychological safety research: Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard Business School, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams (1999) and The Fearless Organization (2019); Google, Project Aristotle.

Relocation behaviour and reasons: Allied Van Lines job relocation research. Generational priorities: Deloitte Gen Z and Millennial research. Working Genius and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team frameworks: Patrick Lencioni and The Table Group.