In today’s talent ecosystem, where candidates hold the upper hand, having a solid company culture is a must for running a profitable business. A winning company culture can improve crucial aspects of talent management, including employee engagement, retention rates, and overall productivity. Organizations must understand that company culture can either be their greatest strength or their most harmful weakness.
A toxic company culture makes employees’ lives more challenging even while doing the simplest of tasks. Signs of a toxic work culture could be outdated work policies, lack of perks, unclear growth trajectories, and more. At first, a toxic culture might not be very easy to spot, but numbers speak for themselves.
“As per a recent global survey, three in five workers agreed that their company culture caused them to lose interest, motivation, and energy at work.”
As an effect of this, organizations face increased attrition, lower productivity, employee absences, and damages to the company’s performance.
This article explores some of the toxic traits in a company culture that are often overlooked and how to fix them with effective talent management.
Unclear Growth Trajectory
It is important for employees to have access to challenging work in a long-term setting and achieve their professional goals. When employees sense they’re far from their goals, they tend to lose motivation, resulting in a turnover. It is a fact that companies with a purposeful mission where employees felt engaged had an attrition rate 49% lower than those who did not.
Most organizations fail to provide ample opportunities for growth that make the employees quit. It is imperative to identify who needs new skills, who needs a promotion, and who needs a career path mapped out. Such care for employees builds loyalty and ultimately results in a long-term collaboration that retains the employees and binds the company culture.
Hiring for Culture Fit
Hiring for culture fit has turned into an outdated and obsolete recruitment strategy resulting in a lack of quality talent within the organization. Most organizations seek out carbon copies of their employees, which makes the company culture remain stagnant and ultimately start to decline.
It is of great importance that organizations prefer “quality” rather than “quantity” in the talent management of 2022. It feels comfortable to have hundreds of similar employees that match the culture, but it won’t take you anywhere far. What is important at the moment is to have a diverse workforce coming from around the world with fresh ideas and methods for business success.
Lack of D&I initiatives
Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is becoming irreplaceable as organizations are pushing to develop a work environment more reflective of the current demographic progression. Achieving diversity in the workplace is not more an ethical metric but an essential fiscal metric as well. Numerous studies indicated that companies with higher diversity are ~36% more likely to have financial returns above their industry peers’ medians.
Diversity is also a tool to bring a social change by creating opportunities for individuals to achieve their goals irrespective of their sexual orientation, social background, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, faith, and disability. Companies with lesser diversity and inclusion in their company culture unknowingly make their culture toxic by not allowing anybody outside the “culture fit” to enter the company. This not only drags down productivity but also makes the existing employees feel a lack of talent in their teams.
No Attention to Employee well-being Initiatives
We’ve recently witnessed the great resignation movement that shook the talent management of global organizations. The heart of the matter lies in employees feeling taken care of. Employee well-being is mostly avoided in organizations considering it an aspect of little importance, and it has to be addressed in the best way possible. As a matter of fact, employee well-being was one of the major reasons behind the great resignation.
Employee well-being is how employees’ work, expectations, and workplace affect their overall health and happiness. Organizations must look beyond the numbers and actually understand the different facets of an employee’s life. Some important aspects of any person’s life include social, emotional, environmental, financial, as well as physical wellness and all of these matter in company culture.
Little to no Learning Opportunities
Given the current talent crisis in digital skills, several companies are concerned about their ability to acquire specific skills to match the pace of this digital revolution. To compensate for this, businesses are pouring investments into technology, and not a growth-linked company culture. They are paying very little to no attention to the employees that need to move with the company. This has spurred up the need for reskilling the traditional workforce into the workforce of the future.
While the pathway to organization-wide reskilling is inundated with a different set of challenges, integrating an AI-backed talent management platform can simplify this entire skill-building process.
Talent management platforms such as Draup help Fortune-500 enterprises with data-backed insights of the talent market and emerging trends organizations have to catch up with.
The AI-driven analytical platform chalks out a comprehensive reskilling pathway with essential parameters, including the skills required and relevant skill gap-bridging curriculum/certification programs offered by worldwide institutions/universities. Draup makes sure that your company stays ahead of the curve when it comes to labor trends.
Draup for Talent is a next-generation talent management tool that identifies various aspects of a company culture and provides solutions to fix them at a faster pace. From plotting growth trajectories to managing your D&I Initiatives, Draup’s AI-backed talent management takes care of your culture.
