Even Greater Expectations

By Emily Berridge

Culture; it’s a bit of a slippery concept. The Oxford English Dictionary definition of culture reads: “the customs and beliefs, art, way of life, and social organization of a particular country or group.”

The importance of culture and climate to employees has been thrown into sharp relief by the pandemic. In a recent Promising Outcomes study of nearly a thousand US employees (which you can read more about here), a positive working climate and culture was a top 10 expectation for employees at every job level, with all but one level naming it within their top 5. If you Google the term workplace culture you are greeted with an array of material on everything from research into workplace culture, articles on how to improve your workplace culture, and big CEOs from a multitude of industries espousing the term. It’s clearly a hot topic and rightly so.

Of course, most companies get workplace culture wrong. Recent research by Hinge into organisations within the professional services industry exposed a “widening fault line”?that sets mid-level and senior executives against each other.

Key findings suggest:

• Career level has a direct impact on the likelihood of employees to be satisfied with their company culture; nearly half (48.1%) of the mid-career employees surveyed reported being dissatisfied compared with a similar percentage of senior executives (44.8%).
• A culture clash also has big implications for employee retention in these target groups; a whopping 94.4% of those who reported being dissatisfied with the company’s culture were actively looking for new work. When you compare it with the finding that none of those employees reportedly satisfied with their company culture were actively job-seeking, the difference is even more poignant. ?
• Of those who had quit their positions within the last year, poor company culture was cited as a reason by over half. ?

The study by Hinge concluded that if your organisation is willing to accept the existence of a culture clash, and willing to collaborate with employees to solve the problem, you will be much more likely to find successful solutions and retain employees. Suggested solutions included:

• Providing in-person happy hours
• Reinforcing company values
• Availability of company performance metrics.

But before you run off and start implementing the above, there is something no-one at Hinge is mentioning. Here at Promising Outcomes, we would argue there is another much more effective method for understanding and healing your company’s culture clash, retaining employees, or maybe even preventing the culture clash in the first place and it’s based on expectations.

Discovering your employees’ ideal expectations regarding company culture and asking how they rate your current performance against those expectations will deliver deep insight. Those expectations have been shown to be superior to employee satisfaction surveys and other methods. ?This allows you to pinpoint exactly where you are going wrong in your organisation, thus ??saving you money and time.

Here's an example. Hinge’s study shows that their sample of mid-career professionals believe that providing more mental health days would help to improve company culture.?Imagine there is a way of discovering if this is truly what your employees would want; this is where our method comes in. Knowing what your employee expectations are before making broad, sweeping changes allows you to avoid changing things that don’t much matter to employees, while focussing on the things that do. For example, it might be that for your employees, mental health days were never really the problem, that your employees were already pretty happy with their ability to take a mental health day, but they could really do with more transparency from the company on their role within it or they really don’t know where their career path is going and could do with more guidance. It is very hard to meet or exceed employee expectations if you don’t know what they are.?And if you haven’t gone through a rigorous employee-centred process to reveal them, that seems like the place to start.

If you think there might be a culture clash in YOUR organisation, or you want to prevent one, get in touch today and see how our expectations-based method can help you tailor a successful new EX programme for your company.