Culture: why it's the hottest topic in business today.
Last year Merriam Webster’s dictionary stated that the word “culture” was the most popular word of the year. It has now become one of the most important words in corporate board rooms, and for good reason.
New Deloitte research shows that culture, engagement, and employee retention are the top talent challenges facing businesses and business leaders. More than of half business leaders now rate this issue “urgent” – up from only around 20% last year.
Gallup’s latest research shows that just 31% of employees are engaged at work (51% are disengaged and 17.5% actively disengaged). This means that over half of people employed in your company don’t care about the business and 17.5% will actively slag you off to other employees and destabilise new initiatives within the workplace.
Combine this with the fact that so often the biggest threat to any transformation or digital project is people, yes your own employees, and you can see why having an aligned, listening and focused workforce is perhaps the most important aspect of any organisation.
So which companies have it right and how do they do it?
Zappos: Zappos hires according to cultural fit first and foremost. It has established what the company culture stands for, and fitting into that culture is the most important thing managers look for when hiring. This promotes the culture and creates happy employees, which ultimately leads to happy customers.
Warby Parker: has made company culture a focal point by creating a dedicated team tasked with coming up with new events and programs to promote community.
Squarespace: one of the darling start-ups in New York created a flat management structure which allowed their employees to feel that their opinions would be heard and valued. This level of freedom and empowerment creates confident employees and improves morale.
Google: Google has visited and revisited their company culture tirelessly showing that even the best culture needs to revisit itself to meet a growing workforce. The most successful company culture leads to successful business, and that requires an evolving culture that can grow with it.
So now you know why, as digital recruitment specialists, we always bang on about cultural fit and why we run cultural fit testing as a standard part of our candidate selection process. We like happy clients that like happy employees.
Building new skills
8 年There is also space here within the cultural fit for the "team" to accept new employees. Again costly for companies but I think the benefits, Return on Investment or Total Cost of Ownership will be greater than the initial expense, less churn and something to use the newer Agile vernacular, "awesome" employees with more buy-in to the company vision or mission.
Building new skills
8 年Steve, Thanks for this. How should recruitment companies actually do this? How do companies invest what could be even more time to achieve this? I like the "try-before-you-buy" thing and having potential candidates "work" with the team for team acceptance would be a good thing but is time and money invested by the company. I would also like to get past the checkbox, machine learning algorithms... sometimes! I have been turned down within 5 minutes of applying and by companies who say they look for cultural fit but seem to work on the checkbox culture.