When was the last time you did a health check of your organizational culture? When sat in the executive suit, it can be easy to imagine that the rest of the workplace is a hive of productivity; a well oiled machine. But what if your organizational culture is eroding right in front of you, and you haven’t even noticed?
Employees like knowing that their voices are being heard. So much so, that a recent Salesforce study revealed that this factor alone can infuse your team with a staggering 4.6x capacity to yield their best performance.
To tune into how morale really is on the work floor, an increasing number of businesses turn to organizational culture surveys. Today, we’re going to look for the qualities that should be built into your surveying strategy if you choose to take this route. We’ll also examine when a corporate culture audit may be a better fit for your business needs. So lets get right down to it.
Why Keeping Up With Company Culture is More Important Than Ever
The instability of the last few years has certainly taken its toll on business culture—not only across the United States but around the globe. Where rolling out organizational culture surveys annually would have once been considered an aspirational achievement, these days it doesn’t really make the cut.
The impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, transitioning too and from working from home, climactic stresses, and economic uncertainty triggered by the war in Ukraine all add new layers of complexity to your organization’s cultural vulnerabilities. The good news is that keeping tabs on your team with tools like organizational culture surveys or corporate culture audits can enable you to stay ahead of challenges and build in the resilience that will ensure your business thrives no matter the bumps in the road.
Key Features To Look For in Organizational Culture Surveys Software
If you decide to go the organizational culture surveys route—or even combine multiple culture monitoring resources—what kinds of features do you need at your disposal? Digital survey building tools can be exceptionally handy, especially when they have been created with this kind of use in mind. You’ll want to be able to curate tailored questions that are relevant to your business and add company branding as a starting point, but let’s look at what else you’ll need.
Consider whether you’ll want to roll out different types of surveys, such as those looking at Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) which measures how likely your team are to recommended your organization as a good place to work, or pulse surveys which are—as they sound—brief and frequent in nature.
Finally, you’ll want to consider what kinds of analytics you’ll want at your disposal. The right survey software should allow you to track results over time so you can identify the evolution of corporate culture and zero in on teams and departments individually. You may also want access to benchmarks data, letting you compare your business culture’s performance to that of other companies.
When a Corporate Culture Audit Is the Better Option
Surveys certainly sound good on paper, but they need to be structured and strategically targetted if they are going to be an effective tool. Factors such as survey exhaustion—when employees get tired of seeing all those tick boxes—or bias unintentionally built into your survey can compromise its efficacy. If organisational culture surveys aren’t getting you the results you’d hoped for, it might be time to call on something a bit more comprehensive.
If you haven’t surveyed your organizational culture before, it may be better to launch into the practice with a more insightful process than a survey alone. Similarly, if you are experiencing an escalation of signs of eroding corporate culture such as clique behavior, employee thefts, high turnover, workplace bullying, and even white collar crime, then organizational culture surveys are going to be akin to applying a band aid to a broken leg.
A culture audit will give you a full-spectrum overview of the health of your organizational culture. Why not discover more about this process or contact the specialist corporate team at Lauth Investigations today? We’ll happily share how we can help you forge a culture that can’t be beaten.