Beyond the Bottom Line: The Case for Soft HRM in Building a Thriving Workplace Culture

As Larry Senn, a luminary on corporate culture, once stated, "Culture is not an initiative. Culture is the enabler of all initiatives." Consequently, from this quote, what can be analyzed is that, corporate culture is an initiative that enables existing and future initiatives. Since this is one such initiative that enables current and future initiatives, many may think that corporate culture is a burden. Once a business sets up a better culture, decisions, and ideas within a business will flow faster and better.

Therefore, businesses can be seen to practice Soft HRM to adapt to the changing workplace dynamics to achieve organizational goals, growth, and long-term benefits as compared to traditional personnel management, which usually focuses on stringent standards and benchmarks. To be a successful business, human capital must be respected, nurtured, and developed in order to achieve organizational needs. Effective strategic Soft HRM practices, such as a focus on behaviors, attitudes, and any necessary technical skills that the job calls for, performance-based compensation, employee empowerment to enable them to work in teams, and many more, tend to have the potential to enhance and sustain organizational performances, according to Ashfaque Alam and Ujjal Mukherjee (2014).

The following article will discuss the necessary soft HRM practices to foster a healthy workplace culture, thus benefiting both employees and businesses in the end.

The Importance of Workplace Culture

It is defined by Drennan (1992) as the most straightforward manner of describing workplace culture, which refers to how things are done in the work environment. On the other hand, Schein (1984) described culture as a norm, psychological predispositions, or assumptions shared by the employees of a particular workplace that normally influence their behavior. These definitions give an overall idea of workplace culture, which can be understood as an environment that allows people to work in a certain way by adhering to a certain set of norms, values, and rules while impacting people psychologically to react in a certain way. Davenport (2016) compared the workplace culture to the soil. By elaborating on this statement, it will be noticed that it is the soil that's mainly responsible for providing the nutrients that enable the plant to grow- exactly as workplace culture does to let employees grow and thrive. Depending on the richness of the soil, employees will either be empowered, motivated, and engaged, or quite the opposite. This underlines that workplace culture can instill trust, respect, and collaboration whereby employees will be empowered, motivated, and involved in giving the best efforts possible, which in turn impacts organizational performance.

According to the Mission & Culture Survey conducted by Glassdoor, in 2019, 77% of employees considered the culture of a company before applying for their desired job. Similarly, in 2019, a study conducted by Grant Thornton LLP and Oxford Economics showed that almost half the employees are resigning from their jobs for a lower wage opportunity at a better workplace. Thus, paying more attention to a healthy and positive workplace culture contributes much to better employee engagement and retention. Workers will feel attached to or a part of their working environment, thus having job satisfaction that will give them motivation and increase their productivity levels. Therefore, a positive workplace culture diminishes employee turnover and propels businesses toward success.

Furthermore, Boushey and Glynn (2012) also found that most American firms pay around a quarter of an employee's wage to replace that employee while the cost might differ or increase when they are replacing lucrative employees. Whatever cost may change based on the wages of the employees; the companies still have a strong impact of high turnover. This would help avoid the problem if companies revised workplace policies and did more to retain employees in the first place.

Besides this, the well-recognized brand Patagonia has never followed traditional culture intending to achieve success and built-up new ways to manage the workplace. Patagonia's Environmental Internship Program provides a fully paid internship for an environmental organization where they are eligible to take up to two months off work and the company also provides flexible working time, even in the middle of the day. These strategies allowed the company to become the first "benefit corporation" before environmental and social preoccupation because of the turnover in 2012 (World Economic Forum, 2023).

These examples provide a rationale for workplace culture, which needs to be established beforehand for a strong argument in favor of adopting soft human resource management practices.

How Soft HRM Aid in Promoting Workplace Culture

Whereas traditional personnel management focuses on the company's net income or profit by commanding strict policies, rules, and performance metrics, Soft HRM practices cover employee engagement and well-being to achieve organizational goals instead (Guest, 2011). For instance, Microsoft Company was always criticized due to its rigid policies which valued performance metrics and competitiveness over an intense workforce leading to high pressure due to achieving measurable results under Steve Ballmer's reign. This cutthroat competitiveness has been changed for good by Satya Nadella, who remolded the company culture into Soft HRM practices of employee empowerment, encouragement, and well-being. It was now able to take on juggernauts such as Apple and Amazon with a market cap flirting with $1 trillion as one of the most admirable companies in the world (Wong, 2023). 

It means the development and promotion of Soft HRM holds immense significance in order to bring proper dynamics in workforce culture. While rebuilding the practices by focusing on Soft HRM, an organization should concentrate on the key elements such as:

Employee Empowerment: Incorporate employee participation in the decision-making process and implementation of the task where employees are free to take initiatives

Communication: Incorporate transparent and open communication forum for connecting employees and management

Training and Development: The investment in growing employees, enhancing their skills, and letting them learn something new. Work-Life Balance: Ensure policies and procedures are in place that allow all employees the possibility to achieve work-life balance. Recognition and Support: Feeling that employees are valued and encouraged in the workplace by the employer.

Emphasizing these key elements will put any organization in an enviable position to create a workforce that can be effective, involved, and motivated for the good of the organization.

Conclusion

Corporate culture may be initiated as a tool to promote past, present, and future initiatives; firms can embrace Soft HRM practices as companies continue to adapt to a changing workplace. A healthy and positive workplace culture is greatly associated with employees' motivation and retention practices that bring job satisfaction and further motivate and increase productivity among workers. A good workplace culture could reduce employee turnover and lead to business success. The soft approach to HRM would involve employees' engagement and well-being on the road to attaining organizational objectives, focusing on those very important elements: employee empowerment, communication, training and development, work-life balance, recognition, and support. Companies like Microsoft, which have focused on employee empowerment and welfare, have been able to change their cultures to adopt Soft HRM, and in so doing have become more productive and motivated. It follows, therefore, that organizations can build a productive, engaged, and motivated workforce for organizational benefit by way of paying more attention to these key elements.

Reference

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