Feeling respected at work is what matters most to employees, according to new research.
Employees rank respect as the number one aspect of company culture and is the single best predictor of a company’s culture score, according to new research released in an article in MIT Sloan Management Review. Identifying toxic managers who are causing employees to disengage and quit is also an incredibly cost-effective way to boost corporate culture, noted the article authors Donald Sull and Charles Sull.
RESPECT MATTERS
The finding is extremely important to CEOs and CHROs, who are fighting to retain employees more than ever. Nearly 4 million Americans quit their jobs in April; the highest monthly number ever recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. During this wave of resignations, culture is top of mind for many employees.
The analysis, featured in the article 10 Things Your Company Needs to Get Right About Culture, found that respect is 18 times more powerful as a predictor of a company’s culture rating than the average topic in the study, which measured over 150 dimensions of the employee experience.
The strong language employees use to describe disrespect suggests how deeply it affects them. Employees describe being demeaned and degraded; viewed as disposable cogs in a wheel or robots; or treated like children, second-class citizens, crap, garbage, dirt, trash, scum, or idiots.
RESPECT VARIES BY INDUSTRY
Respect for employees varied by industry. In industries with a large number of front-line employees – including casual restaurants, grocery stores and specialty retailers – workers were more likely to talk about respect in negative terms. In sectors with a high percentage of professional and technical workers, such as management consulting, enterprise software and semiconductors, employees were less likely to mention respect; but were more positive in their ratings when they did.
“Human resources and business leaders face a series of challenges while navigating the post-Covid return to work,” said Donald Sull, Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Co-founder of CultureX. “Understanding the elements of culture that matter most to workers can help retain star employees and attract new recruits, especially during this huge labour shortage.”
LEADERSHIP MATTERS
The authors report that leadership is the most frequently discussed culture topic, after respect. “Nearly half of employees (45%) mention management in their reviews, and their collective assessment of the top team is a strong predictor of a company’s culture rating; four times more important than the average culture topic and twice as important as discussions of an employee’s immediate boss,” according to the authors. “Employees assign more of the credit (or blame) to the C-suite, as they are responsible for several of the factors that matter most to employees’ assessment of culture; including benefits, learning and development opportunities, job security and reorganisations.”
Another important predictor of a company’s culture score is whether managers support their employees. Employees describe ‘supportive leaders’ as those that help them do their work, are responsive to requests, accommodate employees’ individual needs, offer encouragement and have their backs, noted the authors.
UNETHICAL BEHAVIOUR
‘Toxic managers’ are at the other end of the spectrum from supportive leaders. Employees describe them as ‘horrible’ or ‘poisonous’; and say they are ‘abusive, disrespectful, non-inclusive or unethical’. Unethical behaviour is “a particularly dangerous form of toxic management,” added the authors.
Integrity also matters to employees. Integrity is the cornerstone of most organisation’s official culture. Nearly two-thirds of all companies list integrity or ethics among their official core values. Ethical behaviour is more than twice as predictive of a company’s culture rating than the average topic. Unfortunately, “pockets of unethical behaviour remain a reality in many organisations”, noted the report.
“Identifying toxic leaders and addressing their behaviour is often the single most impactful step an organisation can take to measurably improve its culture,” highlighted Charlie Sull, Co-founder of CultureX.
WHAT MATTERS MOST TO STAFF
According to the report, the 10 elements that matter most to employees include:
1. To feel respected
2. Supportive leaders
3. Leaders live their core values
4. Toxic managers
5. Unethical behaviour
6. Benefits
7. Perks
8. Learning and development
9. Job security
10. Reorganisations
RESEARCH METHOD & ANALYSIS
The MIT Sloan Management Review (MIT SMR) article, 10 Things Your Corporate Culture Needs to Get Right, is based on a five-year, rigorous large-scale research project conducted by CultureX to measure corporate culture in top companies, using a data set of 1.4 million employee reviews on Glassdoor.
CultureX analysed the average culture score for companies in the MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500 a sample of large organisations, mostly based in the US – using cutting-edge artificial intelligence (its natural employee language understanding platform) and human expertise. To identify which factors were most important in predicting a company’s overall culture score, CultureX calculated the SHAP value for each topic. SHAP values are based on a game-theoretic model developed by Nobel laureate Lloyd Shapley. Click here to read the full article.
Recent research also found that empathic leaders are key to retaining staff and reducing employee burnout. Click here to read more.
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