How to assess organizational culture: a guideline
A friend of mine took up the Head of Culture Change role at a significant corporation nine months ago. As a business person, she never had to implement transformation programs formally, let alone tackle the issue of organizational culture. Organizational culture encompasses the values, beliefs, and behaviors that shape how work gets done within an organization. Not to be repetitive, but as management thinker Peter Drucker says, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." If you do not understand and capture the organizational culture, it can wreck havoc. Psychologists would liken organizational culture to the powerful subconscious. This powerful force can jeopardize achieving your annual goals, such as getting in shape again, as it wants to keep you in your comfort zone. Similarly, unearthing organizational culture is crucial: it helps you gain insights into employee satisfaction, productivity, and overall organizational health.
My friend, who was new to the role of Head of Culture Change, embarked on a journey of learning. She attended several conferences on organizational design and change management, hoping to gain insights into organizational culture. However, these conferences, while informative, did not provide her with the practical knowledge she needed:
How on earth do I capture the organizational culture?
How do I create a comprehensive culture survey spanning various business units?
And when do I have to do it all at the same time?
Photo by Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash
And she is right to wonder about this.
I, too, often miss articles that help those deep in the trenches of a transformation project break down such mammoth tasks into tangible actions.
So here it goes - my response.
Creating your own cultural assessment framework might sound daunting, but it's a practical and effective way to understand your organization's culture.
By using a mix of qualitative tools, such as interviews, and tried-and-tested tools available on the analytics market, such as Culture Amp's tools or the Qualtrics survey platform, you can gather comprehensive data.
This data will not only help you identify strengths and areas for improvement but also enable targeted interventions that support your transformation goals. Remember, these tools are designed to make your life easier.
Taking stock of methods to assess and ultimately optimize the culture is essential. Draw on:
Surveys
Focus groups
Interviews
Observation
Document analysis.
Let's review them!
Surveys
They are a building block, allowing you to collect data from various employee segments (and business divisions). Bonus: Surveys provide quantitative insights into different cultural dimensions.
Consider including these questions in your survey:
How well do the company's stated values align with your values?
How effective is communication within your team and across the company?
How satisfied are you with your current role and responsibilities?
How open is the company to new ideas and innovation?
Do you feel that the company promotes inclusivity and diversity?
Great, you might think. Which tools can I use?
SurveyMonkey: Offers customizable surveys, robust analytics, and a user-friendly interface.
Google Forms: Free to use, easy to share, and integrates seamlessly with Google Workspace. If you have had to poll customers in the past (like I have), you may already be familiar with its easy-to-use features.
Qualtrics: The software enables you to create in-depth surveys and is backed with analytics for comprehensive assessments. I appreciate their online dashboards, which overview engagement levels across divisions and highlight attrition risks.
Typeform: Interactive surveys that engage respondents and increase response rates - a "One-stop shop" with quizzes and conversational forms (only showing one question at a time - it's more fun and keeps respondents on their toes).
2. Focus Groups
Focus groups facilitate discussions among small groups of employees, providing in-depth qualitative insights. This method can uncover nuanced perspectives that surveys might miss. Focus groups resemble sounding boards, but while sounding boards constitute a recurring forum, focus groups can be one-off events.
Tools for Conducting Focus Groups:
Zoom: Ever since COVID-19, the majority have incorporated video conferencing with breakout room features into virtual office life.
Microsoft Teams: Integrates with Office 365, ideal for structured virtual focus groups.
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3. Interviews
Conducting one-on-one interviews allows you to dive deeply into issues and lets respondents share their experiences and opinions. You will get a lot of qualitative data and need to make an abstraction of your own and the respondent's bias. Interviews are also a great channel to tap into tacit know-how within the employee base. By this, I refer to solutions to roadblocks.
Before an interview, do the following:
Prepare a semi-structured interview guide
Create a safe space: Ensure confidentiality to encourage openness and honesty.
Use transcription tools like Otter.ai for accurate record-keeping.
4. Observation
In theory, observations are an excellent method to decipher organizational culture; observing daily interactions and behaviors within the workplace provides insights. However, as an observer, you impact the setting you observe through your own presence; hence, take that into account. Insights from observations constitute qualitative (= subjective) data—keep that in mind.
Tips for Effective Observation:
Be unobtrusive to avoid influencing behavior to the greatest extent possible
Document observations systematically using digital tools like Trello or Miro.
Photo by Bernd Klutsch on Unsplash
5. Document Analysis
I encourage you to review company documents such as mission statements, internal communications, and policies. Why? It can reveal formal aspects of the culture.
Focus on assessing the following:
Employee handbooks
Internal newsletters
Policy manuals
Organizational charts
Leveraging Digital Tools for Comprehensive Assessment
Make use of the many reliable digital tools that exist in the marketplace! You want to save time by not having to crunch numbers yourself. Here is a selection:
Culture Amp
Features: Employee feedback surveys, analytics, and benchmarks.
Advantages: Designed to measure and improve organizational culture, offering comprehensive insights.
Glint
Features: Real-time employee engagement surveys and predictive analytics.
Advantages: It focuses on employee experience through integration into LinkedIn.
Miro
Features: Digital whiteboards for collaborative brainstorming and analysis.
Advantages: Facilitates visual organization and team collaboration.
Trello
Features: Kanban boards for task management and qualitative data organization.
Advantages: Simple and visual tool for tracking observations and action items.
Conclusion: Just do it! Rome wasn’t built in a day
Assessing your organizational culture can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. To lessen your workload, I created this overview of qualitative tools, such as interviews and focus groups, and quantitative tools, such as online surveys. Digital tools, in particular, do a lot of the work for you as they provide you with dashboards and cross-silo views (helpful when you have to take stock of the culture in various business divisions). In summary, understanding and assessing your organizational culture is the foundation on which you can build your transformation.
Now that you have a comprehensive understanding of how to assess your organizational culture, it's time to put this knowledge into action.
Sources:
Kailash Ganesh for Culture Monkey: “35+ Must-ask questions for your next workplace culture survey in 2024”. Published on 24 April 2024. Link.
Gartner: “9 Questions That Should Be in Every Employee Engagement Survey”. Published on 07 July 2022. Link.
HR.com. Maximizing human potential: “A few hard truths about employee engagement surveys”. Published on 10 March 2023. Link.