Employee turnover is costly, disruptive, and often underappreciated until performance suffers. In Tulsa’s evolving labor market, employers face increasing competition not only to attract but to retain skilled talent. Leaders who want to build stable, high‐performing teams must be proactive: identifying the root causes of turnover and implementing systematic practices. Below are five steps Tulsa employers can take to reduce employee turnover, followed by how working with The Pursell Group can enhance those efforts.
Step 1: Diagnose the Real Drivers of Turnover
The first step in reducing turnover is to understand why people are leaving. Exit interviews often reveal surface reasons—pay, commute, benefits—but employers should go deeper. Are people leaving because of lack of growth, unclear expectations, poor leadership, misfit with culture, or insufficient feedback? Conduct anonymous surveys, stay interviews (checking in with current employees), and analyze data—time in role, promotion rates, engagement scores, manager effectiveness—to identify patterns.
In Tulsa, industries like animal health, agriculture, ag-tech, consumer packaged goods, and life sciences are especially sensitive to turnover caused by technical mismatch, regulatory pressures, and fast pace of innovation. Leaders in these fields must listen closely to what drives their people—whether from lab scientists, regulatory specialists, field sales, or operations staff—and take those insights seriously.
Diagnosing drivers also means looking at hiring practices. Sometimes turnover begins at or near the start—people take jobs expecting one thing and discover another. Clarity about role, expectations, culture fit, and growth potential should be part of the recruiting and onboarding processes.
Step 2: Improve Onboarding and Early Engagement
Once new employees are hired, the first weeks and months are pivotal. A poor onboarding experience is one of the strongest predictors of voluntary exit. Employers in Tulsa must design onboarding that goes beyond paperwork: help new hires understand organizational values, operations flow, key stakeholders, and what success looks like early on.
Early engagement also matters. Assign a mentor or a buddy, set up frequent check-ins, help the new employee find small wins, establish connections across teams, and solicit feedback about how the onboarding is going. Clear short-term goals, visible support, and alignment with leadership help the new person feel part of the organization rather than isolated.
Companies that invest in onboarding reduce “first-12-months churn” dramatically. Especially for technical or leadership‐adjacent roles in specialized sectors (animal health, biotech, ag-tech), onboarding must include both operational orientation and cultural orientation—what it means to work here, how decisions are made, what leadership expects.
Step 3: Offer Growth, Learning, and Career Pathing
One of the strongest levers for retention is helping people grow. Employees who see a clear development path are far more likely to stay. Tulsa employers should build career maps for roles at all levels: what criteria are needed to move up, what experiences employees need, what skills will matter five years from now.
Investing in training, certifications, leadership development, coaching, cross-functional assignments, and stretch tasks sends a message that the organization believes in its people. For sectors such as life sciences, animal health, ag-tech, regulation, or science-based industries, continual learning is almost a necessity given regulatory changes, innovation pipelines, market shifts, and technology adoption.
Also, succession planning helps. When employees understand that senior roles are not static but potentially reachable, retention improves. Even if someone may not move immediately, knowing that opportunities exist and that the firm is thinking long-term helps reduce the anxiety that often leads people to look elsewhere.
Step 4: Cultivate Strong Culture, Feedback, and Recognition
Culture is often cited as a reason people stay or leave, but it is more than words on the wall. Culture is the daily experience of values, norms, relationships, communication, and how people are treated. Tulsa companies that succeed in retention pay attention to how employees feel in terms of respect, belonging, and alignment with purpose.
Feedback must be frequent, honest, and constructive. Performance reviews matter, but the ongoing rhythm of conversations—both from manager to employee and upward—is equally important. Employees want to know not only where they are doing well, but where they can improve, and what support is available.
Equally important is recognition. Recognizing effort, achievements, innovation, and loyalty builds psychological safety and trust. Recognition can be formal or informal: celebrating milestones, highlighting successes publicly, offering meaningful rewards, or simply saying “thank you.” Especially in technical, mission-driven sectors, purpose and recognition often matter as much as compensation.
Step 5: Align Compensation, Flexibility, and Well-Being
Even with good culture, career paths, and feedback, if compensation or lifestyle demands are misaligned, turnover risk remains. Employers in Tulsa should ensure that pay scales are not only competitive locally but benchmarked against similar firms regionally and in relevant industries. Total compensation includes not just salary, but benefits, bonuses, equity, and non-monetary perks.
Flexibility has become non-negotiable for many employees. Remote or hybrid work, flexible schedules, wellness programs, mental health support, work-life balance—they all play a role. In industries where frequent travel or field work is required, employers should explore ways to mitigate burn-out, schedule demands, or geographic relocations.
Well-being goes beyond physical health. Managers must attend to load, stress, morale, resources, and support systems. Turnover often escalates when employees feel overworked, undervalued, or disconnected. Regularly measuring well-being—as part of engagement surveys or by listening regularly—ensures that issues can be addressed early.
Why Working with The Pursell Group Amplifies These Steps
The Pursell Group is a Tulsa-based executive search and recruitment firm that offers more than simply matching resumes to job descriptions. Employers who follow the five steps above find that organizations like The Pursell Group both support and multiply those efforts in several critical ways.
First, The Pursell Group brings deep industry specialization. Their focus spans sectors such as life sciences, animal health, veterinary medicine, ag-tech, agriculture, consumer packaged goods, pet care, non-profit, and related fields. Their recruiters aren’t generalists but have detailed knowledge of regulatory environments, innovation pipelines, scientific demands, production challenges, and cultural expectations within those domains. This means that candidates they place are far more likely to fit role expectations, sector dynamics, and organizational culture—reducing mismatch which is a major source of turnover.
Second, they offer flexible, tailored search models—retained, contingency, and hybrid. When a role is mission-critical, leadership-level, or strategically important, those flexible options mean The Pursell Group can adapt to the employer’s timeline, confidentiality needs, and standards. This approach ensures that the recruitment process itself reinforces retention: by allowing thorough vetting, strong alignment conversations, and careful presentation of what working in the role will really feel like, rather than rushed or superficial hiring.
Third, their leadership demonstrates professionalism, credentials, and ethical rigor. With founders who hold certifications like Certified Personnel Consultant (CPC), Certified Employee Retention Specialist (CERS), accounting/finance expertise, and accreditation by national recruitment standards organizations, The Pursell Group operates with high integrity. Employers that work with such a firm get support in managing compensation benchmarking, confidentiality, clear expectations, and long-term relationships. That contributes to lower turnover because employees are less likely to feel deceived, overpromised, or surprised by culture or role reality.
Fourth, The Pursell Group helps ensure clarity from the start—about role, growth, expectations, culture, and leadership. In its intake/discovery phases, the firm works with client companies to deeply understand what they need, who will succeed, and how the organization works, including its values and workflows. This early alignment supports onboarding, sets expectations, and reduces early departures.
Fifth, their commitment to candidate care and post-placement follow up elevates retention risk management. It’s not just placing someone in a role and moving on—The Pursell Group monitors outcomes, supports both client and candidate, helps with offer negotiation, and can assist with ensuring that the expectations set during hiring match lived experience. That ongoing attention helps identify dissatisfaction early and allows employer to take corrective measures before turnover occurs.
Putting It All Together: A Roadmap for Tulsa Employers
Reducing turnover is a journey, not a one-time fix. Tulsa employers can integrate the five steps with The Pursell Group’s strengths to build resilient retention strategies over time. Start by using The Pursell Group as a resource during hiring planning—not just when you need someone immediately—to benefit from their market insights into compensation, candidate motivations, and industry trends. Combine that with internal diagnostic practices to get a clear picture of where turnover is highest and why.
Next, align onboarding and early engagement policies so that what you promise in recruiting is delivered in practice—use job previews, cultural conversations, leadership messaging, mentor assignments. When roles are placed via The Pursell Group, ensure the onboarding process includes the context of what was learned in the search (candidate’s motivations, expectations, what attracted them) so that the employer can reinforce those factors.
Use The Pursell Group’s specialization to identify candidates who are likely to stay—not only technically strong but aligned in culture, purpose, and growth outlook. Your internal systems for feedback, career mapping, and recognition should then reinforce commitment. Regular stay interviews, manager training, transparent recognition all help.
Lastly, make compensation, flexibility, and well-being central—not afterthoughts. Benchmark with help from firms like The Pursell Group who see many offers, know what high-quality packages look like in given industries, and know what candidates currently value. Use those benchmarks to design compensation, benefit, work arrangements that meet both business needs and people’s expectations.
Reduce Employee Turnover with The Pursell Group
Employee turnover drains resources, hampers growth, and undermines morale. But Tulsa employers who follow structured, intentional approaches—diagnosing root causes, improving onboarding, offering growth, cultivating culture and recognition, and aligning compensation and well-being—can significantly reduce turnover risk. When those internal efforts are paired with a trusted executive search firm like The Pursell Group, the payoff is greater: better quality hires, clearer expectations, stronger alignment, and ultimately increased retention. For companies in Tulsa and beyond that want stable, mission-driven teams, investing in both internal culture and external expertise is not optional—it’s essential.