Corporate culture is rightly receiving ever-greater attention. It is described as the DNA of an organization, and there are as many corporate cultures as there are companies. But what makes a positive corporate culture? How can it actually be measured, and how can it be improved?
In this article I introduce an innovative measurement method that is clearly superior to conventional employee surveys. It enables companies and business units, with minimal effort and low cost, to measure corporate culture practically in real time, to identify trends early, and to implement specific, targeted improvement measures.
Corporate culture
A culture is made up of shared values and convictions. In a corporate context, this can mean shared norms and values, a shared understanding of the company’s strategy, a particular way of communicating and interacting, and so on. Corporate culture is often described simply as “how we do things around here”.
In a positive corporate culture, employees identify with the company’s strategy and values. They actively contribute to the company’s success. Good interaction among employees and supervisors enables them to contribute without fear of negative consequences, to express their opinions, to critically question processes and products, to bring in ideas, and to point out problems in the organization. For this they receive appreciation. They show a high level of loyalty and commitment to their employer and are willing to deliver peak performance. A positive corporate culture is visible not only inside the company but manifests outwards as well. Customers and potential employees notice it, and it constitutes a significant competitive advantage, not least in attracting talent.
A positive corporate culture creates the foundation for the sharing of information, and thus for organizational learning and innovation. It enables a company to fully unfold the potential of its employees, and it means that the company’s know-how is not the sum of individual employee know-how, but a multiple of it.
If corporate culture plays such an important role, we definitely want to know where our company stands. But how can we measure culture?
Measuring corporate culture
Many companies conduct annual or biennial employee surveys to measure employee satisfaction and corporate culture. This type of survey has several disadvantages:
- Participating in the survey requires a significant time investment from employees.
- The survey is a snapshot and is highly susceptible to external influences.
- Evaluating the answers takes a long time and produces an overwhelming amount of information. The top-down transfer into the organizational units takes time, and any measures can only be taken long after the survey.
- While survey results can be compared, the large interval between them makes it difficult to analyze the effectiveness of specific measures in isolation. The reasons for an improvement, an absence of change, or even a deterioration remain unclear.
- Static surveys over several years no longer do justice to today’s dynamism in the corporate environment.
The collaboration platform LutherOne with its module FRIDAY6 [1] offers a solution. FRIDAY6 is an employee-survey instrument that works with weekly, intelligent mini-surveys of six questions [2] (statements to be rated on a Likert scale from 1 to 10). The questions come from a pool of 100-120 questions covering a wide range of topics and are assigned individually to each employee. The question sets therefore differ across employees, and employees receive different questions each week. Answering the questions takes 1-2 minutes and can be done conveniently on a computer or smartphone. Management thus receives a comprehensive weekly picture of the situation in the company and in the various business units. FRIDAY6 offers companies a number of advantages, some of which are outlined below:
- FRIDAY6 can be tailored extensively to the specific needs of the company.
- The results of the surveys appear weekly in a comprehensive management cockpit, with numerous dimensions relevant to corporate culture – company climate, leadership, trust, engagement, customer focus, strategy, and so on. The cockpit shows both the status quo and the corresponding trends.
- The user-friendly presentation and handling, and the very low effort required to respond, ensure a high participation rate over time.
- The close-meshed surveying and clearly structured dimensions allow specific development areas to be identified and targeted improvements to be made. The effectiveness of the improvement measures can be measured within a few weeks, and corrective action can be taken quickly.
- The regular surveys lead by themselves to an improvement of corporate culture. Employee motivation rises because they can actively contribute. This effect is reinforced when they sense that they are being heard and that their feedback leads to improvements in the organization.
- A reduced form of the management cockpit is accessible to all employees and creates transparency and trust.
FRIDAY6 creates optimal conditions for measuring corporate culture and for initiating cultural change. Through its many dimensions, companies are able to take specific, smaller measures without getting lost in the complexity of cultural challenges. Especially in today’s environment, which is shaped by constant change, this is indispensable.
Has this caught your interest? Get in touch – I’d be glad to discuss with you how you can measure the culture in your company in real time and continuously develop it.
safety & risk solutions GmbH, Tel. +41 76 343 44 09 or email fabian.landherr@safetyrisksolutions.ch
[1] The FRIDAY6 module is available stand-alone. There is no requirement to implement further modules of the LutherOne collaboration platform.
[2] For smaller organizations, instead of FRIDAY6 with its weekly six questions, the monthly 16-question Monthly16 is available. This extends the evaluation cycle but delivers qualitatively better results.