Focusing on company culture is more important than ever as work attitudes change. Having a strong culture enables businesses to hire better-fitting employees in terms of skills and personality. Moreover, well-defined values make it easier for everyone to stick to a mission.
Conversely, a non-existent or poorly defined company culture will result in disengaged employees, and products and services can suffer—resulting in lost customers and revenue.
For many HR teams, creating a strong company culture is difficult. HR tech can help by freeing up time and making your processes more efficient. This technology also has many other benefits when elevating company culture.
What Is meant by HR tech?
The term “HR tech” is used to define all software that eases the administrative burden of HR teams. It can be used to screen applicants, analyze employee performance, and save time.
Examples of HR tech include employee analytics software, payroll automation systems, and application tracking systems.
The Biggest Challenges When Creating a Company Culture
Finding People With the Right Skills and Personalities
Recruiting employees with the skills businesses need is difficult enough, and the complexity mounts when HR teams also need to consider personalities. If team members don’t share values or buy into a company mission, nurturing a culture that inspires growth and innovation is problematic.
When seeking to hire people that are a good match, teams must be crystal clear about what they’re looking for. Fine-tuning job descriptions and filtering searches will help.
Mergers and Acquisitions
Though the average value of merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions declined in 2020 compared to 2019, M&As were still an essential part of growing many businesses.
Source: IMAA analysis; imaa-institute.org
Such practices can help companies increase their market share, consolidate assets, and more. However, if companies are not careful, M&As can also pose a threat to their company culture. If the two businesses and their employees aren’t on the same page, internal clashes can happen.
If a business is looking to complete an M&A, it must look beyond the financial aspects alone and consider how to mitigate potential risks to its culture.
Scaling Without Losing Identity
When scaling a business across numerous locations, or from startup to corporate, neglecting culture is a serious risk. This is particularly true when scaling across diverse regions.
Becoming a global brand without sacrificing company culture is possible. Apple and Spotify are two examples of businesses that stuck to their original mission, despite serving hundreds of millions of people. Both have scaled without losing their corporate identity through good planning and strategizing.
As the company expands, HR professionals should ensure every new hire can contribute to their existing culture and reinforce the company’s core values.
How to Use HR Tech to Elevate Your Company Culture
Use Screening Software to Find the Right Fit
Remote and hybrid work mean that HR teams can expand their recruitment internationally. However, being unable to meet in person can make identifying and selecting the best-fitting applicants more challenging.
More companies are turning to technology to help. In July 2020, research published by McKinsey & Co. revealed that 85% of surveyed executives have sped up their companies’ digitization process.
Source: McKinsey Global Business Executives Survey, July 2020
If teams are not already using the technology, screening software can help to find the right employees quickly. Instead of manually sifting through resumes and cover letters, HR teams can focus on other important tasks.
Use Messaging Solutions to Improve Communication
In Glassdoor’s Workplace Trends 2021 report, the company pointed out that 70% of its employees want a hybrid working agreement in the future. With team members spread across different locations and working at different times, however, communication becomes more important than ever.
Slack conducted a remote working survey in 2020 that highlighted the challenges of communicating using such models. They showed that 14% of the platform’s users still found that inefficient or slow communications and processes impacted them. For participants not using Slack, that figure rose to 21%.
Source: Report: Remote work in the age of Covid-19, Slack, April 2020
Though messaging solutions won’t solve all of HR teams’ problems, having the tools in place will allow colleagues to set expectations and boundaries. With effective communication, employees will feel engaged and supported while upholding the company’s culture and vision.
Use Onboarding and Offboarding Software
To emphasize and improve company culture, businesses should pay equal attention to their onboarding and offboarding processes.
When integrating new hires within a company, giving them a run-through of the mission statement and values—and how they fit into the big picture—is essential.
When their time with the company is coming to a close, outgoing employees are a great source of feedback. HR teams can use this information to tweak their current practices accordingly.
HR tech is a capable tool to help welcome and say goodbye to employees in a way that elevates company culture. Teams can use survey software to gather feedback when offboarding and engagement technology to support their onboarding program.
Invest in Analytics Software
Measuring employee performance is about more than how much money a person brings into a company. HR professionals also need to monitor employee engagement and offer growth opportunities.
To reinforce company culture, businesses need employees who are willing to improve and innovate for their benefit, and the benefit of the company.
An effective way to measure how employees are doing is by investing in HR analytics software. These platforms enable the department to benchmark data, analyze why employees are leaving, and more.
Invest in Technology to Invest in Your Culture
Elevating company culture is a team effort, and the tools they use can make all the difference. Investing in HR tech is a great way to improve company culture by saving time and energy on manual work. HR teams will also find that they can gather information faster, engage employees better, and spread their message more effectively.
HR tech also allows hiring managers to screen potential employees, helping your company to achieve a balance between skills and personality.
Author Bio
Dean Mathews is the founder and CEO of OnTheClock, an employee time tracking app that helps over 10,000 companies all around the world track time.
Dean has over 20 years of experience designing and developing business apps. He views software development as a form of art. If the artist creates a masterpiece, many people’s lives are touched and changed for the better.
When he is not perfecting time tracking, Dean enjoys expanding his faith, spending time with family and friends, and finding ways to make the world just a little better.