Truth, lies and surveys: Most data on company culture is not credible

Mission statements, town halls, roadshows and engagement surveys can be useful in illustrating company culture, but they’re only painting half of a picture.

In 2022, there are four initiatives that organisations must employ to gain deeper understanding of their company culture. These will reveal any underlying cultural issues, as well as opportunities for retention, improved performance and strategic growth.

Cultural misalignment

Did you know that organisations with mature and aligned cultures can be up to four times more profitable than those without? It’s little wonder that CEOs and executive leaders are hungry for any and all measures to understand how they can harness this key business driver. 

Often, though, efforts to define and quantify company culture are surface-level at best, and only paint half a picture. Actions based on flawed or incomplete data can lead to the wrong culture-change initiatives, or an under-investment that leaves risk lurking beneath the surface. 

A recent study of nearly 700 US companies found little to no correlation between stated company values and employee perceptions of the organisation. This misalignment can have disastrous consequences on business performance and staff retention, particularly as we prepare for significant movement in the talent market in 2022.

Gaps between true culture and the way management teams measure and understand it underscore how complex and multifaceted culture can be.

Why measuring company culture requires more than surveys

No single perspective can paint a full picture of an organisation’s culture. Instead, culture is the combination of leaders’ values (tone at the top) and employees’ beliefs, behaviours and perceptions (echo from the bottom).

Most leaders have a clear vision of what they want their culture to be and go to great lengths to define and demonstrate it, making tone at the top relatively easy to gauge. But this can create a false sense of security.

Standard tools like mission statements, town halls, roadshows and engagement surveys tend to echo what employees think management teams want to hear, rather than reflecting the true culture of the organisation.

These tools, particularly culture surveys, have three shortcomings:

• Few people believe the promises of anonymity that accompany these surveys. As a result, they are unlikely to respond honestly;
• Loyalty is a powerful force. Most people have a natural inclination to protect those they work closely with, and to report more positively on them; and
• External pressure from managers will influence results, particularly if the manager’s compensation is linked to survey results.

Combined, these factors tend to give management and boards an overly rosy picture of the strengths and risks in their organisation’s culture.

These fundamental flaws in standard measurement can make culture seem elusive and immeasurable, but innovations in approaches are creating new and better ways to understand and calibrate it.

Assessing culture objectively

There is no single definition of a good culture. Instead of asking whether their company has a ‘good’ culture, leaders should instead be asking if the company culture is ‘mature’.

The features of a mature culture include alignment between behaviours, values and strategy; alignment between leaders and employees; and alignment across business units and regions.

Working towards this goal in 2022, leaders must employ four key principles to evolve their understanding of their organisation’s culture and remove biases in measurement that obscure the truth.

The four principles

1. Clarify the strategy-culture connection

   Align on the organisation’s strategic direction and the culture required to enable it. Leaders must be crystal clear on the behaviours and values that must exist to accomplish strategic goals.

2. Invest in the right cultural diagnostics

   To get a clear and accurate picture of an organisation’s existing culture, the tools used must get beneath the surface and reveal the ‘cultural truths’ that exist within the organisation.

   Getting to the heart of your organisation’s culture requires state-of-the-art, data-driven culture analytics that are tailored to individual businesses.

3. Leverage data for focused action

   Organisations often try to do too much with the insights they get on culture. Keeping strategic needs in mind, create targeted strategies to address cultural gaps in the areas that matter most.

4. Create a feedback loop for continuous growth

   Culture is constantly evolving, whether leaders want it to or not. The ability to regularly assess and refocus interventions is nearly as important as getting accurate information in the first place.

With accurate analytics to assess and diagnose cultural strengths and risks, organisations can ensure 2022 will be a year defined by true employee-organisation value alignment, and therefore better business performance, working towards strong, inclusive and transparent cultures.