Dive Brief:

• HR professionals, people managers and employees have very different opinions about workplace culture, who drives it, what’s important to creating a great one, and what can destroy workplace culture, a new survey reveals.
• The survey, The Workforce Institute at Kronos and WorkplaceTrends Employee Engagement Lifecycle Series: Who’s the Boss of Workplace Culture?, found that about one-third of HR professionals said that the head of HR defines the culture, while only 10% of managers and 3% of employees agreed. 
• In turn, 26% of managers said their executive team defines workplace culture, 29% of employees said it is employees who define workplace culture and 28% of employees feel that no one defines the workplace culture. Only 5% of HR professionals and 7% of managers feel that way.

Dive Insight:

Joyce Maroney, director, The Workforce Institute at Kronos, called it "surprising, and frankly alarming," to see such a wide gap between how employees view and experience workplace culture versus their managers and HR leaders. Most of all, there seems to be very little common ground concerning who defines the culture, what is important in creating a winning culture, and what can ruin it.

Dan Schawbel, founder, WorkplaceTrends, and author of “Promote Yourself," a New York Times best seller, added that among all the data, what struck him most was that 40% of Millennial employees believe that employees create the workplace culture, compared to 29% of employees overall.

"This is important," Schawbel says. "HR professionals and people managers should take note of this, look for ways to involve employees in the development of workplace culture, and be on the lookout for those disengaged workers who may be poisoning the well – they wield more power than you may think.”