Company culture is a vital part of any business, and it is responsible for the beliefs and attitudes of the company, which can promote higher engagement and productivity. A great company culture can improve morale, provide higher retention, and allow companies to attract top talent. But how do you assess your company culture?
Understanding your culture and how it impacts your employees can be tricky, but you can use a few methods to assess your company culture. Our guide today explores the methods you can use to assess company culture and how you can put your findings to use.
What Is Company Culture?
Before you can assess company culture, you must understand what it is. Like other buzzwords and phrases, company culture does not have one definition, as most companies will put their own spin on the phrase. Generally speaking, company culture is a shared set of workplace attitudes, values, standards, practices, and behaviours adopted across the company.
Company culture reflects the written and unwritten rules that people in your company follow, for example, how much birthdays are celebrated or how your company responds to an employee struggling to hit their performance goals. It is important to understand how a company operates and treats its employees. As company culture can be tricky to define, it is tricky to instil and discuss. However, there are three common ways that employees understand and recognise company culture:
The company's approach to employee performance
The company's recognition and celebrations
The company's missions and values
How To Assess Company Culture
The best way to assess company culture is to follow four steps: assess your values and cross-function metrics, gather employee input, and use external indicators to see how your company culture is perceived. Once you have assessed your culture, you can take steps to improve it where needed and celebrate the areas of success. Each step is detailed below to learn more about accessing company culture.
1. Values Assessment
A valuers assessment is a fantastic place to start, where you conduct a workplace survey to see what your employees think about your company's culture. This assessment will allow you to evaluate your culture, find gaps needing improvement, and identify the areas employees are happy with.
Employee engagement is critical here; you need their responses to make the necessary changes. The assessments aren't designed for your employees to be quizzed but rather an opportunity to share their views on workplace culture. You can conduct a survey sent to each employee or use employee satisfaction surveys and culture assessments from other companies. These third-party surveys help remove any bias and create a survey that will provide the results you need. They can also collate the results for you, protecting your employees' anonymity and offering clear feedback that can be used for your assessments.
Value assessments should be repeated annually to track your progress and identify any other areas in your culture that need improving or adjusting.
2. Cross-Functional Metrics
Another insight into your company culture can be your metrics. Human resource, operations, and finance departments typically track metrics to help you evaluate your company's culture. Sick time usage, realisation reporting, PTO, and productivity metrics allow you to see how your business runs day-to-day and whether the company is a good place to work. High sick time usage, issues hitting productivity goals, and incomplete tasks can indicate a poor company culture.
By engaging with cross-functional teams, you can find new data that shows the performance of your company culture. Companies with good organizational culture usually have high productivity metrics, stable or increasing employee tenure, and decreasing time to fill a role. Regularly checking this data allows you to spot trends or concerns in your culture and address them before they become an issue.
3. Employee Input
Like your values assessment, employee input is invaluable to understanding your company's culture. As mentioned earlier, surveys are an excellent way to know how your employees feel about your company.
Employee engagement surveys are slightly different and chart employee satisfaction and well-being, whereas your values assessment looks more at the company as a whole. These engagement surveys can help you track trends over time and help with your planning and human resource efforts. You can also use shorter surveys, which are quicker for employees to fill in and companies to read through, allowing you to see how they are feeling and implement changes quickly.
A survey strategy is a fantastic way to assess organizational culture, but be mindful of how many you do. Survey fatigue can reduce the number of employees who fill them in and can hinder the results. One long assessment survey a year is fantastic, with shorter quarterly engagement surveys throughout the year.
4. External Indicators
Another method of assessing culture is to use external indicators. External, third-party sources like employee review sites can provide useful information to assess your culture. Current or former employees usually complete these and can show their feelings about company culture. In some cases, these can be biased, especially if there have been dismissals or the reviews were written before any changes. These negative reviews online are visible to potential clients and future employees and can hinder your recruitment in the future. While these reviews cannot be removed, making changes that prevent them from occurring in the future will ensure that you are attracting the best applicants possible.
You can also use reviews and feedback from clients to assess your culture. Negative reviews, experiences with employees, and late or missed deadlines are all indicators of how your company culture is impacting performance. These can help you understand how your company operates and whether the culture is positive.
What To Do After Assessing Company Culture
Whether you have used one organizational culture assessment instrument or all listed above, you will have plenty of information to sift through. How you read through and analyse the data will vary depending on how you obtained it, but you should get to work quickly to understand your workplace culture.
It is worth using a tool to analyse the data, helping you to see what percentage of employees were happy with the culture and what percentage found it needed improvements. You can also use tools to see how many employees have asked for the same change, reflecting their views on what is needed for a strong organizational culture. Analysing your answers is a vital step after assessing your culture, and you should ensure you have plenty of time to work through all of the responses. After that, you can start to implement changes. Here are a few ways we recommend you do so:
Speak to your employees - departmental or company-wide meetings can show your employees you have heard their feedback and allow you to communicate any changes
Make changes at the right pace - rushing to make changes isn't always the best idea; take your time to consider which change is right for your company
Review changes regularly - you need to allow time for the changes to be implemented across the company, but asking for feedback as the changes are rolled out will allow you to assess their success
Go beyond the surface level - are there policies hindering your company culture? Avoid offering a pizza Friday to cover the wound and consider whether big policy changes would improve company culture
Ask for help - there is no shame in reaching out to other companies, employees, or anyone you think could help with your workplace culture
Final Thoughts
Assessing your organizational culture can seem daunting, but it doesn't need to be. By assessing company culture regularly and making the necessary changes, you can create a healthy organizational culture where employees feel valued and can complete their work without additional stress or burdens. A company that takes employee feedback on board and works to improve corporate culture is one that people want to continue working for, so why not send out a survey today and see what your employees think?
Frequently Asked Questions
How Does Company Culture Impact A Business?
Company culture is the foundation of a business and can impact your business in several ways. It can increase revenue and profits, increase retention, improve morale, and foster greater creativity and innovation. When your company culture is good, your company will work better than before, with higher levels of engagement and productivConverselyp side, company culture can cause employees to leave for other companies, reduce their productivity, and leave you with unhappy employees who don't want to promote your business.
Does My Company Need A Culture Assessment?
Culture assessments will assess your company's culture and can provide you with insights into successful areas and room for improvement. A culture assessment makes it easier to see your organizational culture, helping you improve communication, employee engagement, and productivity.
Deciding whether your company needs a culture assessment can be tough. Still, a culture assessment is an excellent choice to ensure your company has a good culture and a positive space for employees.
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