Employee retention is on the mind of every HR manager, but culture is on the mind of the employees. In a recent survey, nearly two-thirds of employees cited corporate culture as one of the main reasons why they stay with their current employer or start looking for a new job.
Culture is the best predictor of employee satisfaction – more than pay and work-life balance.
But what is good corporate culture and bad corporate culture?
This is a more complicated question than it seems at first glance. Most managers agree in principle that culture is important, but they have very different views on which elements of culture are most important.
Also Read: Hiring Remote Employees: 5 Best Practices for HR Leaders
Discover 4 elements of corporate culture that make an employee either feel good or bad in a company.
In most cases, an organization’s official core values express the cultural aspirations of top management rather than reflecting the elements of corporate culture most important to employees.
1. Respect Is Earned, But It Is Also Given
Employees feel valued when they are respected. If you are scoring a company’s culture, being respected is one of the important scales in that list. Why?
Respect is not only the most important factor, but it is more important than other cultural elements. The ways employees use to describe disrespect shows how agitated they are due to a lack of respect. It can be from peers, supervisors, managers, company policies, or anything else. Respect for workers is varied by industry.
Industries with a high proportion of professional and technical workers are less likely to mention respect—and when they did discuss respect, the sentiment was higher. In industries with many first-time workers, including casual restaurants, grocery stores, and specialty stores, workers were more likely to mention and talk negatively about respect than workers in other industries.
2. Supportive Leaders Are a Must
Of all the ways employees describe their leaders, the most important predictor of a company’s culture score is whether leaders support their employees. Employees describe supportive managers as helping them in their work, responding to requests, adapting to the individual needs of employees, and encouraging and supporting them.
Leaders naturally influence all aspects of culture, but being a source of employee support is especially important and is the leadership trait most closely associated with a valued culture.
3. Unethical Behavior Has No Place in a Work Environment
This is a particularly dangerous form of toxicity management. Integrity is a cornerstone of the official culture of most organizations— most companies name honesty or ethics among their official core values.
Integrity is also important to employees— ethical behavior predicts a company’s culture rating more than twice as well as the average theme. Unfortunately, unethical behavior is not something that can be totally removed from an organization.
Identifying toxic leaders or employees, digging deeper to understand the context of their behavior, training them, or removing them are concrete steps that organizations can take to root out people who undermine the corporate culture and expose the company to reputational or legal risks.
4. Learning and Development for Career Growth
Many employees mention training or personal development opportunities in their reviews, making this topic one of the most discussed topics. Employees at top companies positively look forward to programs that match or replace college education.
It provides an opportunity to corporate exposure to top executives, especially early in their careers. Such benefits are more important to corporate employees than front-line workers.
