Company culture plays a major role in retaining international talent because it determines whether Highly Skilled Migrants feel safe, welcome, and effective in your organization. A salary can attract someone, but day-to-day collaboration, communication, and growth opportunities usually determine whether someone stays.
This is especially true for international professionals who are new to the Netherlands and, at the same time, have to settle into a different working style, language environment, and set of unwritten rules. If your culture doesn’t align with that, friction increases and engagement drops.
Below you’ll find the key questions teams ask about culture, retention, onboarding, and measuring what works.
What does company culture mean for international talent?
For international talent, company culture means how people actually collaborate, make decisions, and deal with differences in practice—not what’s written on the website. For Highly Skilled Migrants, culture determines whether they can get up to speed quickly, feel comfortable asking for feedback, and feel like part of the team, even if they don’t yet know the local context.
In day-to-day practice, culture shows up in small, repeatable moments. Think about how meetings run, how direct feedback is, and whether there’s room to ask questions without losing face.
- Communication style: direct versus indirect, and how you handle misunderstandings
- Decision-making: top-down or collaborative, and how quickly decisions are made
- Psychological safety: discussing mistakes without blame, but with accountability
- Equality and inclusion: who gets speaking time, opportunities, and visibility
- Practical support: understanding relocation stress, administration, and language barriers
If your culture remains implicit, international employees have to guess the rules. That costs energy and increases the chance they’ll disengage, even if the work itself is a great fit.
Why do international employees leave despite a good salary?
International employees leave despite a good salary when the day-to-day work experience creates too much friction or offers too little perspective. In addition to compensation, Highly Skilled Migrants also weigh factors such as team dynamics, growth path, workload, recognition, and support with integration. If those factors aren’t right, stability or job satisfaction often outweighs money.
Common reasons for leaving rarely come down to a single cause. More often, small signals pile up, making someone feel less connected or less optimistic about the future.
- Unspoken expectations: what ownership means, how fast you should respond, when something is “good enough”
- Limited growth: no clear path to seniority, leadership, or specialization
- Isolation: little connection with the team, jokes and context you miss, language that excludes
- Feedback that doesn’t land: too direct or too vague, leading to performance being misinterpreted
- Practical stress outside work: housing, registration, health insurance, a partner who can’t build a network
A useful check is to make sure exit conversations aren’t only about salary, but also about moments when someone felt excluded, held back, or uncertain.
How do you build an inclusive culture that increases retention?
You build an inclusive culture that increases retention by making expectations explicit, training leaders in intercultural collaboration, and designing processes so everyone has equal access to information and opportunities. For Highly Skilled Migrants, inclusion works best when it’s visible in decision-making, feedback, promotions, and everyday communication.
Make inclusion concrete and repeatable. That works better than one-off initiatives that depend on a single enthusiastic colleague.
- Make unwritten rules visible: explain how you prioritize, escalate, and make decisions
- Standardize feedback: set moments, clear criteria, examples of desired behavior
- Use inclusive language agreements: choose a meeting language and stick to it, especially in mixed teams
- Design fair growth: transparent promotion criteria and equal access to high-impact projects
- Invest in managers: teach them to spot early signs of miscommunication and withdrawal
Also pay attention to nuance: not every international employee wants the same level of guidance. Ask proactively what someone needs and revisit it after 30, 60, and 90 days.
What role does onboarding play in retaining expats?
Onboarding helps expats stay because it reduces uncertainty in the first months—exactly when Highly Skilled Migrants are most vulnerable to doubt. Good onboarding combines job content, team integration, and practical settling-in in the Netherlands. If you don’t organize those three tracks, someone will feel lost sooner and be less productive.
Effective onboarding is more than a laptop and a tour. You make expectations explicit and build a rhythm of support.
- Week 1: role and goals clearly defined, buddy assigned, agreements on communication and working hours
- Weeks 2 to 4: first deliverables with clear feedback, introductions to stakeholders
- Months 2 to 3: development plan, training, evaluation of workload and collaboration
- Ongoing: check-ins on well-being, language, social connection, and practical matters
Practical topics also affect retention. Think of registering with the municipality, collecting the residence document from the IND, and arranging Dutch health insurance. Which step comes first varies by municipality and situation, so above all, help someone with planning and expectations.
How do you measure whether your company culture works for international teams?
You measure whether your company culture works for international teams by combining retention and performance with targeted signals about inclusion, safety, and clarity. For Highly Skilled Migrants, the first 90 days and the first performance review cycle provide particularly strong indicators. Don’t measure satisfaction alone—also measure whether people feel they have access to information, opportunities, and feedback.
Choose a mix of quantitative and qualitative measurements, and break results down by team, location, and seniority. That’s how you see where friction arises.
- Retention indicators: attrition at 3, 6, and 12 months, internal mobility, contract renewals
- Onboarding indicators: time to productivity, buddy touchpoints, clarity on role and goals
- Inclusion indicators: speaking time in meetings, participation in projects, promotion pace, feedback quality
- Pulse questions: I feel comfortable asking questions, I understand how decisions are made, I see growth opportunities
Make the outcome action-oriented. If you measure that international colleagues end up on impact projects less often, adjust your staffing process instead of planning extra team-building.
How All About Expats helps retain international talent
We help you retain international talent by making the conditions around working and relocating to the Netherlands predictable and compliant, so Highly Skilled Migrants can settle in faster and experience less stress alongside their job. We combine recognized sponsorship, immigration support, and practical assistance, so you and your team can stay focused on onboarding, performance, and culture.
Specifically, we support you with, among other things:
- Immigration via the highly skilled migrant scheme: the employer applies for a residence permit with the IND, and we guide this process as a recognized sponsor where that fits your setup
- Clarity on obligations: as a recognized sponsor, reporting obligations, information obligations, record-keeping obligations, and duty of care apply; we help you set this up in a workable way
- Practical settling-in: guidance with arrival planning, including municipal registration and collecting the residence document from the IND, in the order that fits the situation
Want to discuss an approach that improves retention without adding extra noise for your team? Get in touch via contact us or view our approach to immigration for employers.
