In most organisations, culture has a positioning problem. Generally, leaders recognise the importance of culture to their organisation’s success (80%+ CEOs, in most surveys), but believe that culture can’t, or shouldn’t be, measured. A mushy definition of culture means that culture remains subjective, anecdotal and intangible. In addition, measuring culture seldom occurs or enters mainstream management thinking and priorities.
If you take the old adage of ‘What gets measured gets managed’, and you want to take culture seriously, it becomes obvious that you need to measure culture, embed it into management KPIs and track it’s progress over time.
Nobody experiences your values, they can only experience behaviours
Nobody experiences your values, they can only experience behaviours – culture only exists as behaviours. The good news with this is that if you focus on behaviours, it becomes more objective (observable) so therefore less personal, it’s also more about ‘us’, not ‘me’ (so individual preference or sentiment is less important that collective norms), and it becomes measurable.
The challenge with most culture discussions is that well-meaning and generally agreeable terms are used as headlines (think collaboration, customer centricity, innovation, integrity, etc.), which are difficult to disagree with … but they mean different things to different people, so unless they are described in specific and behavioural terms, adoption depends on personal preference and interpretation. This results in uneven behaviours and people’s experience of working in an organisation depending on the personal style of their immediate manager.
Your culture – how people behave – will determine the results you get.
Common, accepted frameworks and definitions exist for financial metrics (most competent managers can read a P&L, Balance Sheet statement and cashflow forecast and understand it), why not a comparable framework and set of definitions and metrics for culture? Financial metrics mainly describe what has already happened – akin to driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror. Your culture – how people behave – will determine the results you get, so equates to looking forward (through the windscreen) at leading indicators. How powerful would it be to measure culture in as rigorous a way as we measure financial or operational metrics today?
What’s needed, therefore, is twofold: a behavioural lens on culture and a rigorous framework and set of metrics to allow a particular culture to be properly understood and assessed over time. Imagine having access to an objective measure of your culture, how it differs to your intended/aspirational culture and how the ‘Culture Gap’ varies between departments and locations. Doing so provides not only the all-important clarity and transparency of your culture journey, but also means that culture metrics can be built into management objectives to sit alongside operational and financial KPIs.
Measuring culture and providing managers with actionable analysis and insights increases the focus on human dynamics
The usual refrain at this point is to voice a concern that measuring culture kills the alchemy of human behaviour, squeezes the magic and distils culture down to a set of dry, dismal numbers. At Culture15, our experience has shown the opposite to be true – that measuring culture and providing managers with actionable analysis and insights increases the focus on human dynamics, builds manager capability and comfort with the topic and creates more aligned and effective organisation cultures. It turns out that beliefs around alchemy and ‘magic’ (and that you can’t measure culture) are in fact the barriers to creating more human organisations.
Only by clearly understanding what behaviours are expected of you at work, having mechanisms to track culture in a well-structured and rigorous framework and empowering managers to focus on the same goals, do organisations make progress in activating the cultures they need to be successful.
Culture15 is your complete toolkit for tracking culture change. CEOs and Exec Teams at world-leading organisations use Culture15 analytics to ensure success by aligning their culture with their strategy.
If you’d like to learn how to define the culture you need, diagnose the culture you have and close the gap, talk to our team
