Why 8 in 10 U.S. workers want employers' values to match theirs

Taking diversity seriously. Flexible work policies. Transparency. A commitment to excellence.

Scroll through your LinkedIn feed, and you’ll find plenty of new hires excited about joining an organization whose bedrock principles match what they believe is important, too. 

Such pairings aren’t happening by chance. The latest edition of LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence survey finds that a hefty 82% of U.S. professionals agree with the statement: “It is important that I work for a company in which the culture and values are aligned with my own.” 

This uncompromising stand on principles is especially strong among people working in human resources (91% agreement) and marketing (90%), as the chart below shows.

Why those two fields? The very nature of HR and marketing work requires constantly articulating and propagating the employer’s values. If there’s a mismatch, that’s not just an irritant on the commute home. It can make every aspect of the workday seem hollow or forced.

Other job functions with an especially intense commitment to values alignment include community and social services (89%), product management (89%), program and project management (88%) and purchasing (88%). 

Even in domains such as research, education, finance and sales, there’s at least a mildly above-average emphasis on finding employers with shared culture and values.

By contrast, areas with a below-average emphasis on these factors include entrepreneurship (69%), military and protective services (74%) and legal (76%). 

It feels puzzling at first to see entrepreneurship ranking so low. After all, many founders are refugees from big-company cultures that they couldn’t stand. Time and again, such CEOs set out to build what they believe will be better cultures, championing their (sometimes quirky) approaches as competitive advantages.

What’s magic for the founder, however, may be hard to stomach for team members that think of themselves as entrepreneurial, too. In such cases, shrugging off the boss’s oddities may be a necessary part of career-building at an exciting enterprise — even if values and culture don’t quite align.

Paying attention to culture and values assumes that you’ll find something distinctive (and often different) at whatever employers you consider. The idea of culture as a differentiator has been around forever, but the emergence of clear corporate values is a much newer trend. 

A fascinating analysis led by University of Chicago scholar Raghuram Rajan starts in the 1950s, when big U.S. companies rarely professed any values — at least as tracked by their annual letters to shareholders. Even into the 1980s, it was rare to see much in the way of stated goals beyond making money for shareholders.

Then companies found their voices. The Enron scandal of 2001 hurled business ethics into prominence. A decade later, fiercely competitive markets for talent led companies to focus more on their “employer brands,” often with stated goals that touched on social and environmental topics that might add to companies’ cachet.

Some of this corporate messaging may be opportunistic, or an attempt to deflect attention from unwelcome areas, Rajan and colleagues say. All the same, they see at least some initiatives that put stated priorities into motion. In such cases, job candidates and employees aren’t wrong to take such talk seriously. 

But wait, there’s more!

If you’re interested in a fuller look at the importance of culture and business values for today’s workforce, check out these additional resources from LinkedIn, including a separate survey of professionals and hiring managers. It finds that 89% believe working for a company committed to the values they believe in is important.

Methodology

LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index is based on a quantitative online survey distributed to members via email every two weeks. Roughly 3,000 to 5,000 U.S.-based members respond to each wave. Members are randomly sampled and must be opted into research to participate. Students, stay-at-home partners and retirees are excluded from analysis so we can get an accurate representation of those currently active in the workforce. We analyze data in aggregate and will always respect member privacy. Data is weighted by engagement level to ensure fair representation of various activity levels on the platform. The results represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn’s membership; variances between LinkedIn’s membership and the overall market population are not accounted for.

Allison Lewis and Sharon Resheff from LinkedIn Market Research contributed to this article.