This guide was originally written in 2018. A lot has changed since then (does 2020 sound familiar?), so we’ve added some modern context to help you understand exactly how HR has progressed in its digital transformation.
In the 2010s, from Glassdoor reviews to the Best Place to Work awards, the corporate world developed a keen interest in gauging, rewarding and publicizing the health of company cultures. But beyond offering great opportunities for PR, fostering internal engagement and employee satisfaction was good business.
A study by Harvard-based consulting firm Kotter showed that companies with performance-enhancing cultures that “facilitate adaptation to a changing world” saw a 4x increase in revenue growth. And for those looking for top talent, a widely quoted 2012 study by Corporate Responsibility Magazine revealed that 69% of respondents wouldn’t take a job with a company that had a bad reputation, even if they were unemployed.
Today, we have data that shows that companies focusing on wellbeing see a 5% productivity increase, and for every dollar spent on wellness programs, a return of $3.27 in healthcare savings plus $2.73 in reduced absenteeism costs. And according to Gallup, engaged employees are up to 25% more productive and make 50% fewer mistakes, with sick leave rates dropping by 30-40%.
But a healthy corporate culture isn’t just about boosting productivity. On the negative side of things, it used to cost between 30% and 150% of an employee’s salary to fill a position. Now, replacing an employee can range from up to 90% of a yearly salary for an entry-level position, to 200% for professionals and leaders. Businesses spend more than $1 trillion a year replacing employees who voluntarily leave, and 48% of employees will look for a new job if they feel their corporate culture is going downhill—and that was back in 2018.
The ultimate outcome of this data is that the responsibilities of HR departments have shifted. Modern HR leaders have taken a people-centric approach that emphasizes the role of an employer in the wellbeing of its employees. That means mental health, development potential, work environment, leadership philosophy, compensationm, and more.
Yet, despite our increased understanding that corporate culture is an essential part of any management strategy, it often proves elusive to measure, manage, and maintain. This remains true even over the period of time we’re analyzing here—a period that has seen disruptions as massive as remote work, quiet quitting, and the entrance of a new generation into the workforce.
To put yourself on the path to creating a healthy company culture, it’s necessary to look at what defines corporate culture, its impact on profitability and the ways traditional culture frameworks, employee listening programs, and text analytics technology can help yield scalable shifts for organizations of all stripes and sizes.
Shifts in Corporate Culture from 2018 to 2025
Back in 2018, highly qualified millennials were more focused than ever on aligning with a company’s values and ethics. According to The Guardian, change was “being driven by the so-called millennials. Of those born between 1981 and 1996, 62% want to work for a company that makes a positive impact, half prefer purposeful work to a high salary, and 53% would work harder if they were making a difference to others.”
This remains true today for younger generations. In fact, these sentiments have expanded into new conversations such as those around mental health in the workplace. When it comes to attracting and retaining talent, HR leaders are looking at a hiring landscape in which 60% of Gen Z workers consider, among other things, mental health resources when choosing an employer.
Data from the WHO also shows that the global cost of mental health issues is astronomical: approximately 12 billion workdays are lost to depression and anxiety annually, costing an estimated $1 trillion loss in productivity, and projected to cost the global economy $6 trillion per year by 2030.
While the core components of what we understand as company culture remain, the context has radically changed. Rebuilding and nurturing company culture in a dispersed or hybrid work environment is a formidable task, with 47% of HR leaders uncertain about how to drive change. Now, more than ever, reinforcing trust between employees and leaders is essential for successfully reshaping company culture.
Defining Your Culture in the New World of Work
Step 1: Identify your starting point
While the idea of corporate culture may be hard to pin down, there’s been extensive research on the different elements that shape and influence it. One particularly useful framework is the Johnson and Scholes Culture Web model, which helps deconstruct the often unspoken “way we do things around here” into six tangible elements that shape employee experience:
These six components, beyond helping you draw contours around the seemingly intangible cues you’re sending your employees on a daily basis, provide a structure that will guide you in defining the culture you want to foster in each of the spheres. Only then can you start strategically gathering data and creating a measurable framework for progress and success.
Step 2: Gather actionable data
With your company Cultural Web in place, it’s time to turn to your employees for an objective audit of how well it aligns with the existing cultural paradigm.
In 2018, we were thinking primarily about data that seems pretty static now, like traditional employee surveys and anonymous feedback forms. Although we knew that the richest insights are always found in unstructured feedback, this old model of traditional surveys is obsolete.
The new standard is dynamic, continuous listening: shorter surveys that are sent more frequently to collect feedback on specific topics or themes. This agile approach allows organizations to dive into the finer details of company culture that deserve attention in addition to the big, quarterly or annual ones.
This is where text analytics technology comes in. New capabilities of AI in 2025 are pushing boundaries, and this technology has become a crucial partner for HR leaders to automate analysis and reduce manual tasks in order to focus on insights and solutions.
Here are four key benefits of working with text analytics instead of manual analysis:
- Speed: Text analytics drastically cuts down the time it takes to review and understand large volumes of open-ended employee comments. For example, manually sorting through feedback from thousands of employees could take months, but with text analytics, it can be done in as little as 10 minutes. This quick analysis allows HR leaders to stay constantly aware of employee feelings and involvement, making it possible to react swiftly to issues in a fast-changing work environment.
- Accuracy: This technology can reach about 90% accuracy, which improves as a system processes more data and learns to spot trends and unusual patterns. The objective is to understand text with the same subtle and contextual understanding as a human reader.
- Neutrality: Text analytics platforms offer consistently fair and objective information, whereas in manual analysis people will unconsciously project their own feelings or interpretations onto the feedback. This objectivity is important for guiding employee engagement plans and making sure that the insights used are unbiased and reliable.
- Scalability: With text analytics, organizations can analyze complex, unstructured feedback from many different sources in just minutes—this includes open-ended surveys, transcripts of one-on-one meetings, focus group discussions, employee forums, and chat channels like Slack. As the amount of feedback has exploded since we moved to hybrid and remote work settings, many more digital feedback channels need to be covered than previously.
Since 2018, text analytics providers have come a long way to integrate generative AI into their core offerings. Keatext, for instance, now generates recommendations to improve employee experience in natural language thanks to LLMs. Report generation is another area that leverages this new technology to accelerate the delivery of insights and enable HR leaders to be more responsive to issues.
Step 3: Keep that feedback loop going
With text analytics, HR leaders can encourage employees to provide open-ended feedback without worrying about how to effectively analyze it all. While conducting this kind of analysis before could only be done manually once or twice a year, at most, text analytics allows you to keep a constant finger on the pulse of employee engagement and sentiment. This is true even as your company grows, pivots, downsizes, adds perks and benefits or implements new corporate hierarchies and processes. Corporate culture is a living, breathing thing, and it requires nonstop attention and care if you want everyone to stay in sync with your company’s values and objectives.
Now that your initial feedback loop is set up and various channels of unstructured feedback are continually streaming in, you can adapt quickly as issues arise. In today’s fast-paced marketplace, agility means you’ll have a better chance at keeping your brightest minds engaged, happy, productive and, most importantly, on your payroll.
