It seems like tech jobs are currently disappearing as quickly as vapour from a pot of boiling water. 2023 started with turmoil in the technology sector and an unprecedented number of layoffs.
With over 60,000 employees being cut in January alone, it’s clear that the tech industry is re-adjusting to a new post-pandemic norm at the same time as preparing for a cooldown as economies flat-line, and global growth slows. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Zoom, Twitter, Meta and many more have decided to lay off significant numbers of employees.
The tech sector’s loss is another sector’s gain with many companies in other sectors announcing ambitions to scoop up recently available tech talent. Such examples include Revolut which is hiring up to 1,700 employees, Chipotle is looking to hire around 15,000 employees and Airbus is planning to recruit 13,000 employees this year!
Airbus is specifically seeking employees with experience in digital and cyber technologies, such as cloud computing, robotics, software engineering, and cyber security.
The Culture Gap
What will the experience of these people be when they trade the familiarity of tech firms – with their trademark flat structures, openness to experimentation and healthy appetite for risk – for more traditional enterprises?
Our benchmarking of thousands of companies reveals significant gaps in culture between major players in Technology Sector firms and Traditional Sector firms. See chart in Fig 1. These gaps are most acute in the areas of progressive mindset (29% gap); empowerment (46% gap); and supportive culture (24% gap). The Traditional Sector companies only lead the Career Progression topic with an 11% gap.
Fig 1 – Employee Sentiment by topic for Technology Sector firms and Traditional Sector firms
The overall gap between the Technology Sector and Traditional Sector firms has maintained over the last 5 years, but having narrowed over the pandemic years, has increased from 2021 to 2022 across all topics from 6% to 9%. See chart in Fig2.
Fig 2 – Annual Weighted Average Sentiment (2018 – 2022), across all sentiment topics
Traditional firms looking for tech talent will surely be able to attract tech talent if the price is right, but will they be able to retain them?
So what should organisations do?
The first step to resolving any challenge is to understand it. There’s no use designing elaborate culture transformation programmes and interventions if they target the wrong areas; behaviours that won’t make a tangible difference or things that people don’t care about.
This is where culture benchmarking comes in.
Deltabase culture & employee experience benchmarking
Deltabase works with the world’s leading people advisory consultancies to help their clients get the most value from their human capital assets.
This often involves comprehensive benchmarking of culture and employee experience against a client’s most direct competitors to identify culture-related risks and opportunities.
We have trained and tuned 11 NLP algorithms, each of which allows us to benchmark a specific topic for detailed culture and sentiment analysis.
This covers:
✔ Supportive leadership team
✔ Progressive mindset
✔ Empowerment
✔ Collaboration
✔ Agility & bureaucracy
✔ Workplace technology
✔ Pay & rewards
✔ Work-life balance
✔ Learning & development
✔ Career progression
✔ Diversity & inclusion
When culture benchmarking can add value
Using benchmarking to identify culture gaps between companies is not just important to improve a company’s ability to attract and retain talent, it can also be critical in a post-deal merger or integration.
Cultural incompatibility between two organisations can significantly inhibit the ability for a company to realise the expected benefits and synergies of an acquisition.
Culture benchmarking has been proven to add value in HR due diligence and post-deal integration planning to predict and mitigate human capital risks and exploit opportunities.
Employee sentiment analysis also helps in examining how employees feel about the ‘Employee Value Proposition’ (EVP) and can be used to understand underlying reasons for employee churn.
Finally, the culture of an organisation can play a huge role in the ability and capacity of a company to adopt transformational change. Culture benchmarking can be used to predict the degree to which culture will create headwinds which will slow down a company’s transformation agenda and may even place at risk the benefits that underpin the entire case for change.
Find out more
If you want to explore how Deltabase products can help you to leverage the power of AI to accelerate company research and benchmark companies against their competitors, then get in touch to schedule a quick call with our team to find out more.