Can a bad vibe in the office, deflated employees or lack of leadership bring a good business strategy to its knees? Is a great corporate culture filled with productive, passionate, happy employees enough to overcome a poor strategy? Either way, it seems as though too many leaders may underestimate the importance of culture.

A well-cited Gallup research report from a couple of years ago determined that the most important factor in helping companies grow is employee engagement. The research also revealed that only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. Gartner refers to this as “a crisis of engagement.” The study also shows that when employees of publicly traded companies know what is expected of them, and feel that their opinions matter, the company experiences higher earnings per share along with many other benefits.

Clearly, culture matters.

Identify Ways to Enhance Your Culture

Today, there are many ways to implement culture-strengthening initiatives within an organization. Certainly there are scores of books, videos, seminars and other resources aimed at supporting companies in their quest to help employees feel better about their corporate environment.

But what can technology do to help transform culture?

How your customers leverage technology solutions can help them define, evaluate and improve their culture. A strong human capital management (HCM) suite can drive better business results through improved staff empowerment, engagement, training and development. When you marry HCM to analytics in-house, you’ve also got powerful tools to stay on track with key performance indicators–and employees have quick and easy access to results in real-time.

But that’s only the beginning. There are significant professional services and consulting opportunities for solution providers to help businesses of all sizes increase employee productivity, satisfaction and engagement. Today’s best HCM solutions can help your customers build better relationships with their employees and also their own customers.

SAP feels so strongly about the opportunity for partners that a new benefit of our SAP PartnerEdge program allows our partners to run SAP HCM solutions themselves at a deeply discounted, preferred rate so they can experience the benefits themselves. By doing so, our partners serve as their own true case study of the value of HCM solutions.

Strong Culture Starts From Within

Perhaps the best place to test and develop a corporate culture practice is within your own organization. Survey your own employees to find out what they like, what they want, and how in-tune they are with your corporate strategy and goals. The results may surprise you.

Of course, not all your customers may believe that culture is critical to their success, certainly not at the expense of a solid business strategy. To develop your pitch, simply Google “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast,” a much-used quote attributed to management consultant and author Peter Drucker. One recent headline even suggests that culture is more important than goals.

It’s evident that culture is important to the long-term stability, growth and success of an organization. How well you help your customers see that—and provide them with the tools and services to get there—can also go a long way to determining your own success.

About SAP

SAP offers partners a complete portfolio of end-to-end business solutions that include applications such as ERP as well as analytics and databases. All of these solutions can be powered by SAP HANA, the powerful real-time computing platform; are mobile-ready; and can be delivered via on-premise, cloud or through a hybrid model.

Learn more about partnership opportunities at: http://www.sap.com/partners/.

Ira Simon is vice president, Partner Marketing & Communications, at SAP. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of The VAR Guy’s annual platinum sponsorship.