I started my career in the world of academia, lecturing and researching behaviour change, motivations, attitudes and more. I loved it and when life circumstances meant I had to get a job in the private sector I honestly believed it would be a short-term thing. To my delight and surprise I loved it even more than academia and I have never looked back, albeit I do still keep my hand in with a bit of guest lecturing.
But one of the biggest surprises of all when I moved into the private sector was the huge gap between the world of academia and real-life practice. I was shocked to see some really outdated ideas still being used in everyday practice – I’m looking at you ‘rewards and benefits’! It was disappointing to see that for some reason the communication between the two worlds was so broken that despite best intentions from practitioners, very little progress was being made. This is one of the fundamental reasons that despite huge resources put into improving employee engagement and experience, globally we’ve seen little progress. Put simply organisations are focusing on the wrong things.
This is one of the reasons I set up People Lab -to try and bridge this gap and help organisations focus on the right things, the stuff we know works. And while it’s always great to keep an open mind and look at the latest research I still had a ‘no shit Sherlock’ moment this week on the back of some recent MiT research which evaluated the key drivers behind the ‘Great Resignation’. Wait for it…. The key driver is a toxic culture! We know this right? Although research that backs us practitioners up is always welcome.
And it is a great piece of research, taking in some 34 million employee profiles and breaking down attrition rates across sectors (although it is a US based study). You can take a look at the study here:
Not surprisingly, companies with a reputation for a great culture e.g. Southwest Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, and LinkedIn, experienced lower-than-average turnover during the first six months of the Great Resignation.
What is really interesting about this study was that the clever data scientists were able to analyse various attrition drivers relative to employee compensation. And they found that not only is a toxic culture the biggest driver of attrition it is also 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company’s attrition rate compared with its industry.
So how was a toxic culture defined? The MiT analysis found that the leading elements included failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behaviour. Do you have a handle on the health of your culture? If you’d like to find out more about our culture diagnostic approach then we’d love to hear from you.
