by Emily Rich
What is organizational culture?
Culture includes how the daily tasks are done, but mainly how people feel about the organization. This is reflected in its goals and values, as well as the social and psychological environment that employees, managers, and clients share. This is all part of what we think of when we talk about "workplace culture."
People who work for a positive company culture are happier, more engaged, more loyal, and healthier. UK businesses lose £21.2 billion each year because of employees who aren't engaged, stressed, distracted, or unhappy at work. Research shows that happier employees work 12 percent harder. Therefore there is a strong case for investing in a positive work environment and measuring company culture.
Measuring company culture
Metrics are a good way to figure out how well any efforts to improve the culture of a business are working, just like other parts of a business, like sales, marketing, and hiring. Because it's hard to put something like this into neat boundaries and figure out how to make it into something that can be used
Here are a few things to keep in mind when you start measuring the company culture of any business. It can be seen as a 'health check' of healthy organizational culture.
Communication
In a healthy relationship, good communication is the heart of its health. As an employee, you should be able to say what you think. You should also be able to say it clearly to your coworkers. Everybody in the company should be able to communicate with each other freely and easily across all of the departments and teams. Happy employees will be able to speak to and have strong connections with those on their team.
Communication can be hard to measure, but third-party employee experience analytics systems like ELEFense are a good way to get a more candid, honest answer.
Leaders need to make sense of their raw data to figure out how employees, in general, feel about their jobs. People then need to use this conclusion to come up with actionable ideas that work with their company's overall strategy to see a positive effect on business results. In order to do this, you can use sentiment analysis which will provide a good indicator of how employees feel about the communication and the team dynamics.
The method of measuring and quantifying employees' feelings about their jobs is called "sentiment analysis." It can be used to get real-time information about how teams are doing without having to clean and analyze a lot of data. This is based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools that look at how people speak in surveys and other text-based communication.
Diversity and Variety
When we say diversity, we do not mean demographic or cultural diversity. You need to look at how people think and how they think about the world. When there is more diversity, people can be more agile, adaptable, and creative. In addition, it shows that the person is willing to put their own skills and experience ahead of the company's hiring biases.
As a way to measure diversity, it is common for organizations to track the number of people who get promoted and stay at different levels of the company. They also use exit interviews and ask for employee honest feedback in performance reviews and focus groups. By measuring diversity, companies will be able to measure culture and alter some of the core values.
Environment and Atmosphere
This means meeting the basic needs of people in the entire organization so that they can focus on productive, high-quality work instead of being distracted by other things. Workplaces are always trying to figure out how to better recognize and meet the needs of their employees. Environmental factors can be very different for each organization or workspace. These factors can include ergonomic workstations, healthy and easy-to-get food, and a welcoming design.
Environmental performance can be measured by looking at employee turnover and retention rates, absenteeism, productivity levels, and employee engagement, among other things. No matter how high up in the company an employee is, he or she should be interviewed when they leave. This way, you can find out why they're going and if the company's culture played a role. This will allow greater productivity and a strong company culture.
Agility
Key to a strong organizational culture is the ability to adapt quickly, confidently, and effectively. This helps people to deal with and thrive in a time of chaos. As the environment changes, employees should be able to adapt to the new situation, knowing that leadership is there to help them.
As a way of measuring this, you should shift your focus away from output and instead look at how comfortable teams are with adapting to changes, the results of training programs, and the processes for introducing new technologies and operational processes. You can also use third-party employee analytics apps like ELEFense to track this consistency and organizational performance commitment at every level.
Honesty and openness
Any change in the culture of an organization must start with a clear, coherent commitment to stand up for these beliefs and values. Too often, changes in the culture of an organization feel like "lip service," not really change that would improve culture or get rid of a toxic culture.
It is essential to measure accountability and transparency in order to see how organization culture is working. This can include tracking data about social corporate responsibility commitments, looking at interpersonal relationships and employee behaviour, and so on. A way to do this is to use tools like employee culture analytics and hold reviews for each of your employees like ELEFense. This will help companies achieve their desired culture.
The tools of the future:
There are a lot of things to think about when it comes to measuring workplace culture. People are very complex. The skills, experiences, and values of each person in an organization are unique, and so they will all be different when they interact with the way an organization is run. When something stands in the way of someone's progress, it can help someone else.
It can be hard to figure out how to measure the culture of a company, not to mention how many different factors and metrics there are. As an example, it often means gathering a lot of data that needs to be collected and crunched in the hope that it will give some kind of actionable information.
AI and machine learning have made it possible to get more data from more sources and use it more accurately than ever before.
ELEFense is A.I. driven tech that analyses company activity & builds a unified dashboard to understand corporate culture, sentiment, and keywords in order to assess cultural health and trends. Thus: Improving service levels, reducing costs, deepening customer loyalty, preventing the risk of abuse and more. It is a system that alerts to risk in order to simultaneously protect employees & company.
The system can alert management of negative, or risky events or trends and provide an indication of the company's overall health. The system is in line with legal practices such as GDPR and users can adjust tolerance levels by the customer & country law.
