“Organizational culture” may be an overused phrase, but culture — and the employer-employee connection culture generates — has become part of recruiting, retention and having the right benefits to engender long-term loyalty.

How important are culture and connection within an organization? It can make a major difference in candidate interest and employee satisfaction with an employer:

• Mentioning culture in job postings increases engagement with the listing (67%).¹
• Nearly one-quarter of employees say they’ll leave if they’re not happy with an organization’s culture.
• In fact, 15% of job seekers will decline a job because they don’t feel comfortable organization’s culture. ²

Culture and connection are important elements in building a benefits strategy based on Quality Employee Experiences, or QEX. This approach emphasizes the experience that employees have with the organization and how benefits can improve the quality of those experiences.

The power of the right benefits to support employee culture in the workplace

The importance of culture and connection is magnified by its role in the employee experience with benefits. Using technology and analytics, employers need to understand the needs of their employees, particularly the needs of individual employees.

Leaders can benefit from understanding what elements make up their organization’s culture and simply recognizing what their culture actually is. For example:

• “Caring” cultures emphasize a familial environment and will offer family-centric benefits. For example, such a culture could cover costs for fertility treatments, surrogacy services and adoption.³

• “Learning” cultures put an emphasis on personal and employee development, through education, development plans, consistent employee evaluations, educational reimbursements and sabbaticals.

• “High-performance” cultures are all about delivering value on time and under budget, whether that’s to customers, internal clients or vendors. These cultures make benefits robust, easy to choose and that aren’t overly complex.

These examples are not mutually exclusive, and there are many more types of company cultures than listed above, such as a “cause-based” culture or a “team-based” culture. In all instances culture is often built less on an emotional connection to the organization than leaders may realize.

A common misconception is that employees love their work, the company and its brand, but often employees are connected to their teams and teammates more than the organization itself.

Understanding the difference is important. Organizations should focus on strategies that reinforce the connection with teams or alter it with benefits that deliver on QEX’s promise.

Pulling it all together

Ultimately, organizations should examine their employee culture in the workplace and determine what makes it that way, rather than imagining their culture as something it is not. They should also fashion benefits with empathy in a manner that strengthens their culture and connection with employees.

What’s more important than identifying a culture as “good” or “bad” is understanding its underpinnings — and importantly, whether the culture aligns to the organization’s values and business strategy.

Here are some best practices on evaluating and strengthening culture:

1. Organizations should assess their cultures and see how well they are connecting to employees. This can require an honest evaluation of what leaders believe their cultures to be and what they truly are.

2. Through analytics and data collection such as surveys and focus groups, organizations need to understand where employees are professionally and personally. This should inform the nature and strength of their relationship with the company and point the way to benefits that strengthen connection.

3. Organizations should consider benchmarking against other organizations that have fostered similar cultures, which can help identify benefits that align with the organization’s culture and improve connection.

¹ LinkedIn, “The Reinvention of Company Culture,” January 18, 2022.
² TeamStage, “Company Culture Statistics: Leadership and Engagement in 2022,” accessed June 23, 2022.
³ Attractions, “Disney’s Family Building Program helps case members with adoption,” November 30, 2021.