Healthy workplace cultures don’t fall naturally into place very often. They need to be massaged, coerced, and encouraged. As is often said, “culture starts from the top down,” and workers across the country expect their bosses to maintain good cultures and goose flagging ones. But how do employees feel about those efforts at their actual workplaces? We asked employees, “Does your current employer focus on improving company culture?” and found that while the majority feel good work is being done at the top, a substantial chunk of workers still feel that not enough is being done.
This information comes from the latest reading of an ongoing study by Comparably. Over 5,000 employees responded to the question.
Nearly two-thirds of all respondents answered “yes” to the question. However, the numbers also tell us that 40% don’t feel that their current company puts enough focus on improving culture.
Asian/Pacific Islanders and African-Americans voted “yes” slightly more often than the overall average for all employees. Caucasians, Hispanic/Latinos, and respondents from the “Other” designation all responded “yes” with the same frequency of overall male responders. The spread of responses for all ethnicities is in keeping with overall averages.
The younger the respondent, the more likely they are to answer that “yes,” their company does put enough effort into improving company culture. That number drops steadily with each age bracket, which may mean that the very idea of a company culture (let alone improving it) is somewhat alien to workers who have been in the workforce already for multiple decades.
Compared to age, we see less of a drop in positive responses when responses are divided up by the experience levels of the responders. Those who have been in the workforce for between 1 and 6 years were the most likely to respond positively to the question. But the drop from entry level to “over 10 years” employees is only three points, implying this is not an attitude that sours from experience as much as it does with age.
Employees from the Executive and HR departments were most positive about their company’s efforts at improving culture, both coming in well ahead of positive responses from other departments. Both C-suite and HR employees would seem to have reason to get behind their company’s efforts. They also might have a better big picture sense of how company culture works. Workers in less visible departments, like IT and Operations, were markedly less positive.
While overall male and female averages are close, departmental responses broken up by gender show a few discrepancies. Males in Business Development and Communications answered “yes” with notably more frequency than their female counterparts. And women in Operations were more positive than males in those departments.
Latest reading as of November 13.
