13

September

How to Measure & Monitor Your Corporate Culture

While many companies strive to possess a strong corporate culture and be analytically driven, very few companies use metrics to measure and monitor their corporate culture. Some companies mistakenly believe that corporate culture is simply too subjective and intangible to be measured.

To ensure that your organization has a positive corporate culture, steps need to be taken to regularly get a pulse of your culture, which will then inform the changes you make.

It all starts with getting a real-time measurement of your culture.

Establish a Baseline Measurement

As your company moves forward with monitoring corporate culture, you’re going to want to be able to compare the data you gather with past measurements. If your organization hasn’t already, conduct a survey with your employees to get an initial measurement. Design your survey to highlight the components of your corporate culture. Each organization is going to stress different things when it comes to culture, so make sure your survey is custom-built for your employees. What an accounting firm recognizes as focus areas will be different from a corporate retailer.

When building your survey, strive to make the questions, and the response scoring rubric, as clear and as concise as possible. Keep in mind that you’re going to be conducting a series of surveys as you monitor your corporate culture, so deploy a scoring system that is metric-friendly. Questions that call for a range score is much preferred than a simple yes-no format. Always stress to your employees that the survey is confidential, as you want them to be as forthcoming as possible.

Identify Your Strengths & Weaknesses

Once you’ve compiled the results of your culture survey, pour over the data and discover your strengths and weaknesses.  In the same way that you’d review the data of a campaign or a quarterly report, highlight the insights of the survey and create an action plan. Save all of the data but focus on a couple strengths and a couple weaknesses.

For your focus areas, set a measurable goal for the next survey. For example, if on a scale if 1-10 your employees rated your company’s commitment to work-life balance as an 8.4, you could set the goal of reaching 8.7 on the next survey.

Share the Results with Your Employees

Another common mistake that companies make is failing to be transparent with their employees. They’ll conduct a survey, and then keep the results to themselves. Once you’ve compiled and reviewed the data, share the results with the team. Your employees only know how they perceive the corporate culture and will want to know how the overall company does.

Make sure that you also share the goals with your employees. If you decided to set a goal of having a 7.5 rating or higher for overall culture approval, let the team know that. By demonstrating that you genuinely care about improving their overall experience of working for you, your employees’ buy-in will improve.

Schedule Future Measurements

Schedule out your corporate culture surveys on a regular cadence. Ideally, you’d want to do one once a quarter, so there is plenty of time for you to monitor any progress and regressions subsequent results reveal. At the end of a year, share with your employees some of the yearly measurements as a way to demonstrate all the gains your corporate culture has achieved.

Market Your Results as a Recruiting Tool

As you compile data overtime and groom your corporate culture, you’ll eventually have a very impressive, and tangible, recruiting tool at your disposal. As you compete for talent in the tight job market, being able to demonstrate your corporate culture can be a powerful tool.  Most companies will have a few lines in their candidate pitch that highlights corporate culture but showing candidates your culture in raw data puts a lot more weight behind your statement.

Depending on your survey, you can get pretty granular with how you use it as a marketing tool. If you’re surveying departments and teams individually to get a pulse on how they feel about leadership, you can advertise leadership approval to candidates in the specific departments they’re interviewing in. People go to work for great companies, but they also want to work for great people. Having metrics to showcase your great people can be a valuable asset in your company’s recruiting efforts.

It’s hard to monitor how strong or weak your corporate culture is if you’re not compiling data. But conducting structured and regular culture surveys with your employees, you can measure and monitor how your employees are enjoying the experience of working for you.

Want to learn more about corporate culture? Discover how to create a workplace that prioritizes wellness.

 

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