» Workplace Culture and Its Importance to Recruitment and Retention

March 8, 2022

Workplace Culture and Its Importance to Recruitment and Retention

The importance of developing a vibrant company culture cannot be understated. It’s an essential element of creating an attractive and competitive place to work, and is key in building envy-inducing recruitment strategies that draw quality talent.

Without a visible company culture, recruitment and retention of talent becomes incredibly hard. Corporate culture is a brand flag planted in the ground; a statement of brand intent that specific types of talented people will be drawn too.

Recruiters, business leaders, brand marketers and everyone involved in the business of sourcing, vetting and hiring staff need to understand the magic and magnetism of company culture.

What is company culture?

Workplace culture is defined as the DNA of an enterprise.

It’s the culmination of behaviours, beliefs, actions, interactions, company history, office setup, codes of conduct, codes of dress, operational management, and recruitment and retention of people.

This structure of behaviours and actions is an all-encompassing system of working and living within a workplace, which develops over time, quite naturally, by the people who work in a business.

Company culture is closely linked to a company’s “purpose”. Your purpose needs to be something staff can attach their own values and behaviours too, such as your company ethics, your brand, and what you work for.

Companies, especially talent acquisition specialists and HR teams within companies, need to be able to communicate, and align, company purpose with their candidate’s purpose.

What’s an example of bad company culture?

Bad company culture is repellent to talent.

Poor company culture is often referred to as a “toxic” workplace, and toxicity is an apt description – these types of cultures alienate staff, create resentment, hostility, jealousy, ego-centric behaviours, and in the worst iterations, end up in abuse.

Toxic workplaces are caused by a myriad of reasons: ambiguous leadership, obscure goal setting, hyper-competitiveness, argumentative staff, little recognition for labour, poor decision making, poor communication, and unmanaged stress.

When those experiences are left to fester your people feel unseen, unheard and undervalued.

Your staff, if treated this way, will simply deny you the fruits of their labour. While not the deciding factor in the Great Resignation, one of the major reasons many millions of people quit their jobs over the last 2 years came from a place of deep dissatisfaction in their careers, driven in part by an uncaring style of management and crisis-ignoring, toxic work cultures.

How to review (and improve) your company culture.

Every enterprise will have curated their own workplace culture: whether this is consciously developed, or left to naturally ferment, it’ll be present in your company DNA.

First and foremost, company culture should be at the forefront of your recruitment marketing efforts. Your employer value proposition (EVP) needs to sing with your company purpose, your meaning, your why.

This is what will make the difference when it comes to candidates deciding to join your firm over competitors – does your culture align with candidates’ values and needs, better than another company?

Culture is also essential in creating rigid retention strategies. A supportive, value-driven company culture is a magnet for quality hires and is essential in keeping them with your company as they advance through their career.

To build recruitment and retention cultural magnetism, you need to literally audit your company culture.

How do you analyze your company culture?

Enterprise leaders should review their mainline company culture touchpoints the same way they review the performance of their teams – on a rolling, continual basis, alongside bigger annual reviews to make sure the whole team is aligned, and to remove cultural toxicity.

We urge all enterprise leaders to commit to doing a workplace culture performance review. Here is how you do it:

Recognize and reward

Do you reward your staff? Your performance review strategies need to have defined recognition and reward schemes.
Not only do your teams get the obvious personal perk of a reward (which should naturally be personalized to the recipient), it also improves group morale, with team members seeing the fruits of other people’s good work being rewarded. Recognition lifts everyone, not just the individual receiving it.

Encourage peer interaction

This means leaders need to make an effort to create cross-departmental ideas sharing; open forum meetings between teams; more social and digital events that bring disparate workers together; even to rebuild onboarding strategies to mix and match who new hires meet on their first week.
People like knowing who they work with. But they will also benefit from a little more total company vision, and will be able to empathize with other workers better if they know them personally, and understand their workloads and pressures.

Diversify your team

What is it like to work at your firm? Fun? Challenging? Supportive? Competitive? Toxic? Now look at your people – are they a cross section of your community, your customers, your service users?
Leaders need to continually apply themselves to elevating their workplace as a good place anyone can work in,and a great way to do this is through elevating diversity
Not only does it help leaders drive their company into a more inclusive future, it also encourages the mixing and integration of more diverse ideas, more diverse creative thought leadership, and better representation throughout. Thereby absolutely improving company culture.

What is your company’s purpose and does your team understand it?

Finally, do your teams know what your company’s purpose is?
Your company’s purpose is your brand and HR North Star, and your recruitment and retention strategies are less than worthless if you cannot communicate what this is to your team.
Remember that your company’s developed working culture is the culmination of your team interactions, and the continual development of their behaviours over time. Those behaviours will impact on your new hires, and how integrated they feel in their new role.

Company culture, how you communicate it, how you build it, and how you ferment an understanding of it in your team, will create more attractive recruitment opportunities for prospective talent. But it’s also essential in keeping that talent at your enterprise.