Culture of a workplace is the heart and soul of an organization. It is the social operating system that influences what is valued, how people work, and how the organization interacts with its customers and extended community. Organizational culture is alive, continually influencing and being influenced by the shared values and behaviors of its people. No culture is static. It morphs, improves, or suffers from inside and outside forces. Though they are highly complex and changing, strong workplace cultures act and respond in predictable ways. Great workplace cultures create incredible advantages—they attract talent, mobilize innovation, develop strong leaders, and become the organization’s muscle memory for ongoing success.

The 2018 Global Culture Report by O.C. Tanner Institute is a yearlong study of over 14,000 employees and leaders through quantitative findings. These are derived from online survey interviews administered to employees across Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States about the current and future state of workplace culture. The focus is on identifying key insights and highlighting simple actions organizations can take to create meaningful employee experiences that dramatically improve workplace culture. By doing so, organizations can connect people to purpose, accomplishment, and one another. The Culture Report comes at a pivotal time, with the rapid pace of technological advances in business, major changes in workplace dynamics, and an increasing sense of disconnection in society.

The workplace culture organizations’ need in the future must be cultivated today. The outcome of this year’s study showed how interconnected the Talent Magnets are as below: -

• Having a meaningful purpose creates opportunity and improves chances for success
• Appreciation strongly impacts employee perception of wellbeing and leadership
• Providing opportunity creates a feeling of appreciation and bolsters leadership

The Six Talent Magnets and India findings  

Talent Magnets attract the best people to your organization. They draw out an employee’s inherent desire to do meaningful work
that makes a difference. They retain employees who may have the opportunity to leave. Research shows top performing companies with thriving workplace cultures excel when they focus equally in all the six Talent Magnets. The Talent Magnet Culture Framework is a helpful construct for developing plans, evaluating culture initiatives, and measuring the impact of culture‑building efforts.

1. Purpose: People long to connect to something bigger and more important than them. An organizational purpose should fulfill this longing. Our research demonstrates that Purpose must have five specific elements in order to maximize its effect: clarity, positive effect, differentiation, inspiring toward a collective goal, and motivation. Yet, the data demonstrate that purpose is lagging worldwide; only 66 percent of employees worldwide feel a sense of purpose from their organization.

2. Opportunity: Opportunity is a multi-faceted concept; yet, it is often pigeon‑holed by organizations
as promotion or pay increase. Our Talent Magnet Culture Framework relies on five measures of opportunity: potential for career advancement, continuous learning, the ability to work on special projects, shared influence, and a lack of perceived favoritism. Unsurprisingly, all but continuous learning fell at the halfway mark.

3. Success: O.C. Tanner measures success using five dimensions: the “winning team” perception, organizational reputation, hearing and seeing accomplishment, innovation, and if the team is an example of success. Despite record profits and earnings, we found the perception of personal success to be a weakness in companies throughout the world.

4. Appreciation: Within our Talent Magnet Culture Framework, we discovered five critical dimensions of appreciation: frequency of recognition received the sincerity and meaningfulness of the recognition, consistency of recognition for high performers, leader acknowledgment, and a habit of recognizing others. Appreciation is a powerful emotion, where the individual feels acknowledged and valued, not just for the work they do, but for who they are and the talents they possess.

5. Wellbeing: Organisations can no longer define wellbeing as simply the physical or financial status of an employee. Initiatives must encompass social and emotional dimensions to truly prioritize individual wellness. We measure Wellbeing using five critical components: employees feel prioritized within the organization, there is a balance between work life and personal life, work does not negatively impact one’s physical health, a sense of belonging, and that work does not hurt an employee’s ability to be happy in their life.

6. Leadership: Leaders are often promoted to leadership because they are good at a certain skill, not because they are particularly skilled at leading others. It takes time, experience, and practice to learn to inspire and motivate others to be their best. Our Leadership Index measure mentors and catalysts for greatness.

These are our global analysis with India findings; however, it is not surprising to see the research showing such high numbers in India when it comes to “feeling a sense of” for 5 of the 6 Talent Magnets. This report indicates that 68% to 77% of Indian employees feel a sense for Success, Appreciation, Leadership, Opportunity, and Purpose; however, the percentage for Wellbeing is quite low at 51%.

Companies should focus on creating peak employee experiences equally in each of the six Talent Magnets as it aids in building connections to purpose, accomplishment, and to one another. These connections will produce a workplace culture where employees thrive. The workplace cultures organizations need in the future must be cultivated today. Companies should start by taking a hard look at how their employee experience is impacting their culture and begin connecting people to purpose, accomplishments, and one another.

 “Companies should focus on creating peak employee experiences equally in each of the six Talent Magnets as it aids in building connections to purpose, accomplishment, and to one another.”

What we are seeing is that Indian companies are now putting all their effort into Wellbeing and have put it on the list of priorities for organizations’ initiatives; it feels that a sense of Wellbeing too will improve for Indian employees. There is an apparent scope to improve and do more for employees in those areas of the 6 Talent Magnets.