To boost motivation,
The bonuses and perks, including trips to warm-weather destinations
Employees value the perks, but those incentives must also be backed by day-to-day appreciation to create a formula for a satisfied team.
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"It's super competitive out there, so you kind of have to go away from all those tangible things if you will and say, 'What else is there?' And it's really just how people feel, how you make them feel," said Joey Davidson, president of Acopia Home Loans.
Companies can enhance their traditional benefits with mentoring or training opportunities that keep them loyal. At Birmingham, Alabama-based Method Mortgage, its leaders continue to support staff new to the mortgage business with training and tools to assist them in becoming licensed originators if they express interest. The initiative first emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic with a single employee, who realized many of her friends worked in the real estate community.
It gives the trainee the opportunity to be exposed to many loans, "rather than just a one-a-month kind of thing," said Roger Steur, one of Method's founders and a senior loan officer.
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The experience allows them to learn some of the nuances an originator might encounter. The process includes time with one of the owners "helping work through issues on bank statements or pay stubs for taxes or what have you, and learning both the sales side and the operations and underwriting side," he continued.
Senior management at several companies recognize that type personal touch can play a big role in retaining loan officers and other employees and motivating them to do their best work. While smaller firms may be better sized to building such relationships, how they accomplish it serves as a lesson for businesses of all sizes.
With over 40 branches across the country under his leadership, US Mortgage CEO Steven Milner makes a point to travel to all of them as well as host regular roundtable discussions with
"Our loan officers are our customers," he said. "We have to always think in terms of what we need to do to help our loan officers maintain and grow their production."
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Offering team members flexibility with schedules, including hybrid work, as well as prioritizing benefits and compensation also shows management recognizes the challenges some staff face, he added. Twenty-five of the companies on the list said they offered employees the chance to work remotely at least one day a week.
Mortgage America, based in Whitehall, Pennsylvania, also makes a point of maintaining benefits and salaries that align with today's economic realities.
"We're confronted with a lot of issues like babies and kids, and we have to be attuned to how that works," said Bob Barrett, the lender's president and co-founder. The regional lender is also located in a well-educated part of the country where "everybody's looking to go forward" but still boasts of staff with decades-long tenures
"We're in an area that has a lot of really fine hospitals and a lot of really fine colleges. What we try to do is keep people that are processing at the pay of what an RN would get because the biggest business here happens to be healthcare. So we try to match," he said.
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Maintaining the little perks, such as weekly meals or annual picnics, in good and bad times has also kept employees content, Barrett said.
Whether business is booming or tough, "we haven't cracked down on anything that we would normally give them when it's busy," he said.
Such continuity might be an under appreciated factor for a company's success at retention, especially when an organization's top leadership has also proven to be stable. The average tenure of the CEO or highest ranking official of all 36 honorees in 2025 comes at 18 years. In some cases, such as at Mortgage America or U.S. Mortgage, original founders are still helping lead the business they launched decades ago.
"I think that's important for people when they want to have a comfortable level in the direction that their company is going," Milner said.
