How to Measure Culture
In order to measure culture, you need to know what you’re measuring, but also how the results will be used. Your measurements should be purpose-driven and aligned to your values. Toxic cultures often form when behaviours that aren’t aligned to your purpose and values are tolerated, celebrated, or rewarded through incentive schemes or financial remuneration.
People often think that to measure culture, all they need to measure is employee engagement. This is one component (which I’ll describe later), but your employees can be highly engaged, but working on the wrong things.
To properly measure culture, you need to have a blueprint of the culture you are aiming for and measure how well the organisation is living up to that blueprint. The blueprint we recommend is a co-created Culture Code, which aligns values and behaviours to achieving your strategic objectives, whilst advancing your organisation’s purpose.
With a Culture Code in place, you can then measure if your employees are living up to your culture code. Using the concept of “people as sensors”, our software platform, Salpulse, gives you insight into how well your organisation’s lived culture is tracking compared to your blueprint.
Diving Deeper
Your Salpulse survey will possibly uncover areas where the lived culture is not matching your desired culture. For example, you might find that one of your values is not being lived well. At this point you can dive deeper using behavioural analytics tools. These tools measure an individual’s or a group’s tendency towards or away from certain behaviours.
One such tool is Harrison Assessment. We use this tool to build up a values map, specific to your organisation, which shows an individual’s or a group’s tendency to be able to live each of your organisation’s values, based on their behavioural preferences.
The values map allows you to drill down into an individual’s behavioural drivers (eg: “Diplomatic”, “Optimistic”) that are impacting their propensity to live each of your values. This is a solid, data-driven foundation for having discussions with employees and teams about how they can further embed your organisation’s Culture Code into how they think, behave and work together.
What about Employee Engagement?
Many organisations run an annual employee engagement survey to arrive at a number for their employee engagement level, either as a traditional percentage or an Employee Net Promotor Score (ENPS). And then fall into the trap of focusing effort and energy on lifting a low engagement score – rather than on actually increasing employee engagement. So you start to see initiatives that are based around providing people with free lunches whilst they complete the annual engagement survey, management encouraging employees to increase the score they give the organisation, people giving high scores “mark it 5 to stay alive” as they don’t trust that the data is truly anonymous – there are lots of horror stories around engagement surveys.
It’s OK to measure an engagement score (and Salpulse does this), but don’t let that become your focus. Engagement is a very individual thing. Global initiatives to lift engagement usually don’t work. One person will be looking for flexible work time, another for development opportunities and another will want their opinions valued. Engagement should be a two-way conversation with mutual responsibility between the organisation and the individual. In this conversation, explore what the employee is looking for, but also, what characteristics the employee can work on to support that. For example, if the employee wants development opportunities, are they taking the initiative to research what development opportunities would suit them.
The Harrison Assessment Engagement Survey can help with this discussion because it drills down into an individual’s engagement factors, how fulfilled they are for those factors and measures their supporting behavioural traits.
You’ve measured culture, now what?
You’ve measured your culture, you’ve had individual engagement discussions with your employees. Now, how do you continue to keep your desired culture alive and fresh. There are three components to this:
- Remind people regularly of your Culture Code (your blueprint of the culture you desire)
- Share stories about when people are living your values
- Recognise your colleagues for behaviours consistent with your values
When you recognise and celebrate desired behaviours, it becomes a cue to individual employees of what matters most. This continual reminder serves to reinforce desired behaviours and further strengthen the desired culture. Our software platform, Salpulse, helps your organisation strengthen your culture by reminding, sharing and recognising.
Conclusion
Measuring individual elements of culture can be a misguided activity if you don’t first have a blueprint for what your desired culture is – a culture that moves you towards your strategic goals and advances your organisation’s purpose. Once you have that in place, you can then measure how well you are tracking in relation to that blueprint.
Build a Culture Code for your organisation.
More information about Harrison Assessment