At the launch of the 2025 Salary Survey with Chartered Accountants Ireland and Barden, we discussed what really matters now in the world of work. Salary remains a core factor, but it no longer tells the whole story. There is a new driver behind talent strategy, productivity and long-term value. It is not on the balance sheet, but it is already impacting it.
That driver is culture.
In today's workplace, salary may get talent through the door, but it no longer keeps them there. What is really driving retention, performance and trust is not compensation alone, it is culture. Culture shapes how people experience work, how they perform and whether they stay. Yet many organisations still treat it as an intangible or a side issue.
Regulators and culture as risk
Regulators are no longer treating culture as a soft issue. Both the UK's Financial Conduct Authority and Ireland's 2024 Corporate Governance Code have placed culture at the centre of good governance. The FCA has been explicit: culture is a core marker of governance, organisational strength and risk.
It now expects Boards to move beyond slogans and begin treating culture as management information, visible, measurable and monitored. Yet in many firms, culture remains reactive, not predictive. As the FCA warns, the biggest risks are not product failures or market shocks, but what is happening inside the firm.
Culture is no longer a side conversation. It is the core driver of long-term value.
The culture gap
The salary is right, but something else is wrong. People are leaving anyway, or worse, they are staying disengaged. This is known as presenteeism and it is emerging as one of the quietest but most damaging threats to company performance. As flexibility and trust erode, presenteeism becomes a signal of culture gone unchecked.
Today's workforce is sending a consistent signal. Engagement is dropping. Loyalty is weakening. Risk is rising. Recent research shows one in five employees feel under-appreciated, two-thirds are considering changing jobs in the next 12 months and lack of flexibility is a leading driver of disengagement.
- Forced office returns disproportionately impact women, leading to higher quit rates and a wider pay gap
- 74 percent report that discrimination exists in their workplace
- Just one in ten workers in the UK feel engaged, the lowest globally
There is a growing gap between what employees value and what employers deliver. Recognition, flexibility and autonomy have moved from benefits to expectations. Employees now value flexibility as much as an eight percent pay rise.
Culture is the KPI that moves the rest
Boards and CFOs often ask what is driving performance. The answer may be simpler than it seems. Culture determines whether your talent stays or leaves. It shapes productivity, innovation and resilience and it influences reputation, risk and readiness for change.
Culture is no longer a side conversation. It is the core driver of long-term value. The question is no longer whether culture matters, but whether you are measuring it. If you are not, you are not managing the real risk.
Kintris is the only platform that delivers a full closed-loop system to transform culture into measurable performance: measure, predict, intervene, measure again. Built on validated science and real-world data, Kintris gives CEOs and Boards the performance intelligence to know whether culture is driving success or quietly undermining it. Our Culture Audit provides a deep diagnostic across psychological safety, trust, leadership and team dynamics and predictive insights highlight the true drivers of productivity, risk and readiness for change.