HR Technology: The Hidden Secret Of Great Organizational Cultures

You need a great culture to land the best employees in a talent seller’s market. Technology can help.

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With the U.S. unemployment rate dipping below 4 percent lately, many small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are struggling to find, hire, and retain the employees they so desperately need. Fundamentals like salary and benefits are always important, of course, but in a talent seller’s market, they’re just the starting point.

A growing body of research suggests that a strong organizational culture can be the make-or-break factor SMBs need to attract and keep the best employees. It’s a need that the right human resources technology can help them meet.

In the latest Global Culture Survey conducted by PwC’s Katzenbach Center, 65 percent of respondents said that culture is more important to performance than strategy or operating model, but 80 percent admitted that their organization’s culture has to evolve over the next five years if their company is going to succeed, grow, and retain the best people. As DeAnne Aguirre, U.S. leader of Strategy&, PwC’s global strategy consulting arm, puts it, “There’s work to be done on culture.”

Paul Sarvadi, chairman and CEO of Insperity, which provides human resources and business performance solutions to SMBs, compares culture’s importance in the modern workplace to the role oil plays in an engine. “It’s what makes everything else work more smoothly, efficiently, and powerfully,” he says. “It’s important to recognize that culture has to be strategic and systemic, and that efforts to institutionalize your organization’s culture are equally important.”