Illusive, intangible… immeasurable? Can we find the data behind culture? Ben Heath uses his passion for developing high-performing cultures to explore this a little deeper.
We all know workplace culture is important but it can be difficult to put a finger on why. It is commonly described by phrases such as “the way things are done around here” or “it trumps strategy.” However, what we do know is that when it works well, it is often the single most important factor in helping teams and organisations achieve more than the sum of their parts. It’s a force multiplier. Smart leaders are cottoning onto this and are using culture as a competitive advantage — but how can we measure the intangible?
Perceptions
It is probably a safe assumption that if we stopped 100 people on the street and asked them if they thought culture could be measured, the majority would likely say no. Culture has many definitions, but common to most is the use of words such as ‘values’ and ‘behaviours’. These are intangible and therefore difficult to quantify or measure, right?
A quick internet search will reveal organisations promising company Culture Assessments and insights. These provide numbers, statistics, and data, making the intangible tangible. Some common assessment areas include:
- Retention
- Employee Engagement
- Employee Satisfaction
- Collaboration
- Employee Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer Focus
- Challenge
- Diversity & Inclusion
needs to be collected. We’ve all worked in organisations suffering from ‘survey fatigue’, which provides an immediate barrier to survey completion. How likely is this method to give us a real sense of what’s going on? Poor prior experiences resulting in no action taken can also feed cynicism, adding further height to the barrier. An increasing number of studies suggest that culture manifests itself through elements such as rituals, norms, and language. That’s nothing new. These have been markers of culture since our best tools were sticks and we drew symbols on walls with a sharp rock. Many million years later, we’d expect to have some pretty advanced ways of assessing and measuring these.
Harnessing Big Data
Research has harnessed the power of big-data processing to extract ‘digital trace data’ of culture from electronic communications1. Eyebrows raised? This all sounds very Big Brotherish — I know. It is acknowledged that the organisation will have to permit access to electronic communications and appropriate employee privacy safeguarding measures would need to be put in place.
However, this study does suggest that using language-based cultural measures can help us be more specific about what we want to find out. For example, identifying pain points rather than a more generic ‘temperature check’.
Websites such as Glassdoor also offer valuable insights into workplace cultures. These are anonymous and entirely voluntary and could be useful to Leadership and People teams. In fact, they would be remiss to consciously ignore it due to its prevalence in the public domain.
Despite the drawbacks, Culture Assessments can and do offer senior leaders extremely valuable insights into their company culture. For example, using our AMP framework, Interactive Workshops can provide customisable assessment criteria to help organisations understand how people view culture. So instead of assessing against a generic culture, we can help teams assess their performance against their own values
and behaviours.
A senior leadership team who understands that organisational performance relies almost solely on the collective effort of their workforce, must also understand the importance of improving (and measuring) the glue that binds them all together. This does, however, rely on action. The most common thing that happens after a survey like this is that leaders meet to talk (often at length) about the results. Instead, a simple “You Said — We Did” approach can effectively communicate what action has been taken, making everyone feel heard.
Climate vs Culture
It’s important to think strategically about how information of this kind is collected. Is it best to conduct large-scale culture assessments or would smaller, team-based climate assessments be more palatable? Team and workplace climates are much more dynamic and therefore easier to influence. It is a question of size and scale; the larger the organisation, the more teams and departments it is likely to have. Even with the best will in the world, it is extremely unlikely that we will find any two teams doing things in exactly the same way. Whilst we know we want all our teams pulling in the same direction, connected by a common cause or purpose, sometimes it is easier to reach the desired outcome (steer the ship, achieve the goal) one step at a time.