Dive Brief:

• Salary matters less than culture to a majority of job seekers who learn that a company's employees are overworked, burned-out and generally dissatisfied, according to a report emailed to HR Dive from the HR tech company Hibob. Pollfish conducted the survey, which solicited responses from 1,000 U.S. workers.
• In survey results from the report, 69% of the respondents will reject a job offer if they find out that a company's workers are generally unhappy. More than three-quarters of respondents said a strong corporate culture is "extremely important" to them. On the subject of pay, 25% reported leaving a previous job because they felt underpaid. Slightly more than half of employees ranked opportunities for growth as more important than compensation, the survey found. 
• The respondents' top job-searching tactics included looking at a company's website (32%), contacting a company's employees for insight into their daily experience (29%), using company rating sites like Glassdoor (20%) and looking through social media sites (19%).

Dive Insight:

Attracting and retaining talent is always a challenge for organizations, but in an employee-driven labor market — where workers can be choosier about where they want to work — the stakes are much higher.

"Poor culture and employee dissatisfaction are driving away more than two-thirds of candidates. In order to thrive in today's quitting economy, companies must create workplace experiences designed to retain today's workforce by promoting a clear work/life balance," Hibob CEO Ronni Zehavi said in a statement. "While popular trends in perks have come and gone, culture and opportunity are key drivers of employee happiness and support collaboration and productivity."

Money remains the chief motivator for workers in poll after poll, but a company with a toxic culture can no longer rely on pay hikes to retain talent. A Speakap survey of U.S. and U.K. workers released in May found that culture is important to workers that more than half would leave their current job for one at an organization with a more positive culture. About half said they would consider working a 60-hour week to avoid a toxic culture. Given data like this, organizations might prioritize overhauling their culture to be more positive and engaging. 

One symptom of a toxic culture is an overworked, burned-out workforce. Burnout has become so prevalent at work that the World Health Organization officially deemed it an occupational phenomenon. With the designation as an official work-related health problem, burnout can no longer be ignored by employers. Experts recommend that HR leaders address burnout by, first, educating the C-suite on the numerous studies that demonstrate how it affects employees' health and productivity.