How can you determine if your culture is helping your business or hurting it? Through measuring the right metrics! Sounds simple, but the task can be daunting if you don't know where to start, still have to get people to buy into the idea, or think you're already doing enough by sending out an annual survey. Keep reading to learn the top three hesitations we hear [and how to overcome them]:
Another common myth about culture is that you can’t tie metrics to it. From your perspective, you can probably evaluate what a “bad” culture is - one with high turnover, low employee engagement, low productivity, and toxic behaviors. At the very least, you can guess that a bad company culture will see negative feedback from employees on job review websites like Glassdoor. All of these indicators can be measured, counted, and compared against.
Maybe your culture isn’t bad but has some room for improvement [most company cultures are like that]. Just as you can measure those bad or negative results of company culture, you can also measure the good by looking at the employee experience. Though our ROI calculator is only an estimate [every company is different], you can get a good idea of how the individual impact of your employees can ripple into profits and savings for your company.
Instead of coming in for your annual exam, your doctor asked you to fill out a questionnaire survey and send it back, how accurate do you think her evaluation would be on your health? What are the chances she would miss something important, or that might not mention something that could be critical? We’d say pretty high!
If your organization is relying solely on a survey to evaluate your company culture or employee engagement, it better be one that helps you see the gaps and strengths of your culture [and how to improve upon them]. We’ve run into plenty of big companies who collect employee engagement data but don’t know what to do with that data. They’re unable to draw conclusions between what’s working and what’s not.
Take the Delivering Happiness Index to get a feel for how we're evaluating employee happiness and engagement.
Another ask means more investment, we get it - sometimes it’s hard to manage what’s already on your plate. Look at the initiatives you have in place this year with your Human Resources or People Operations teams, which pain points are they trying to solve?
Some common pain points include:
The thing about culture-building is that is can alleviate multiple pain points since it’s a sweeping, all-encompassing change initiative. Your ideal company culture can be designed to engage your employees, uphold core values, and create a workplace that your employees and potential job candidates want to be a part of. Culture-building isn’t as effective if you only focus on one initiative at a time [i.e., recruiting]. You might slightly move the needle on a specific pain point, but how long will that improvement last if that culture change doesn't happen to other parts of the business? From what we’ve seen, not long.
How well does your culture support YOUR happiness and engagement? Take the individual DHi survey to find out: