When talent walks out the door, it takes more than just their skills – it takes trust, continuity, and your bottom line. Head-hunting fees alone run to roughly two months of salary, but the bigger hit is the inevitable drop in productivity that happens as newcomers come in and try to learn the ropes.
If you're a CEO or HR leader sector struggling to hold onto your best people, this article will help you see beyond pay cheques. I will show you how building trust, clarity, and a genuinely rewarding culture keeps talent right where you need them.
The hidden costs of turnover
In Rwanda, some of the most interesting data on employee turnover can be found in company reports. For example, in 2024, locally listed banks lost around 9% of their staff. Assuming these were mid-career professionals on average, finding replacements for them would have cost about half a percent of banks’ profit before tax, over half a billion RWF.
Yet the productivity losses must have been even greater. A classic study in the US showed that, swapping a junior accountant with someone with less experience costs roughly the same as the accountant’s salary in lost income. Apply that rule of thumb to the above-mentioned banks and employee turnover takes nearly 4% off pre-tax profit or nearly four billion RWF.
You could reduce employee turnover by paying more, that this runs out of road very quickly. Nearly half of banks’ operating cost is employee benefits and paying above the market would be ruinously expensive. Rwanda also suffers from lumpy pay structures across the finance sector. Anomalies within and between companies contribute to high-churn, particularly for the most sought-after skills.
Why compensation isn't enough
Pay anomalies do more than generate individual resentment; they corrode trust across the sector. Firms grow reluctant to invest in staff who might be poached, employees withhold the discretionary effort that fuels excellence, and promising professionals change roles so often that they never gain the depth needed for senior leadership.
The strategic challenge facing banks and other finance companies is to cool the job market, while giving talent good reasons to stay. Technical fixes like internal pay-range assessments, participation in external salary surveys, and a bias toward growing rather than buying scarce skills are part of the answer. But they will not suffice on their own.
Richard Branson put it neatly: “train people well enough so that they can leave; treat them well enough so that they don’t want to.” Positive cultures do more than cut turnover: they boost agility and bottom-line results. The same U.S. accounting study showed junior accountants stayed more than a year longer in firms that emphasised relationships over pure task focus.
Trust, not just pay, keeps talent
Culture is often talked about in vague terms, but it can be measured, and changed. The best-performing organisations don’t guess at what’s driving engagement or holding people back, they ask. They gather structured feedback from staff, analyse how teams work together, and map the behaviours that shape daily experience. This kind of diagnosis turns culture from a fuzzy concept into something leaders can actually work with.
But insight alone doesn’t shift an organisation, change takes commitment. It means developing leaders who know how to build trust, set clear direction, and deal with tension before it becomes dysfunction. It means creating an environment where people feel respected and supported, where they can speak up, collaborate across silos, and take ownership, not because they’re told to, but because they want to.
Better workplaces, not bigger offers
Retaining talent starts with clarity and trust. That means clear pay structures, honest feedback, real development that can suport a positive culture. In a market as restless and uneven as Rwanda’s this can make all the different. Not bigger offers, just better workplaces.
For a closer look at how uneven pay structures drive churn in Rwanda’s financial sector, and what practical steps employers can take to fix them, see my recent New Times op-ed, Why Do My Subordinates Earn More Than Me? .
If this issue is on your radar, consider joining us this Thursday, 5 June, for Align Pay, Retain Talent, a focused, half-day seminar for CEOs and HR leaders. We’ll unpack real-world challenges, explore practical tools, and share strategies for building fairer, more resilient workplaces.
If you'd rather talk one-on-one, feel free to reach out at christian@transformingengagements.com or connect with me on LinkedIn. Always happy to trade stories, compare notes—or help you think through what culture change might look like in your context.