How do you Measure Culture and Organisational Behaviour?
Company culture and organisational behaviour provides businesses with means to understand the current state of their workforce. That is why HR professionals, people analytics, and business leaders must measure culture and organisational behaviour in an effective manner.
As Hani Nabeel stated in an episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast
“Is the way that things get done at an organisation. It is the way your people behave towards each other, to the outside world, to your partners, and to your suppliers” And interestingly enough, he adds “At any given second each organisation, or whatever size they are, their people are enacting that culture”.
Importantly enough, culture and organisational behaviour is the personality of a company seen through the eyes of the employees. Your staff heavily determines how culture and organisational behaviour is perceived and whether it is working or not.
By identifying areas needing improvement and tracking progress over time, employers can uncover potential issues in workplace and stay on top of employee engagement. The key is correctly measuring culture and organisational behaviour to gain the most valuable information to create positive change.
What is the Difference Between Culture and Organisational Behaviour
Both culture and organisational behaviour impact the environment of a business, and both greatly influence how work is done and how the employee perceives the company. However there are certain differentiating aspects worth noting.
What is Company/Corporate Culture?
Company culture is commonly defined as how things are done around the organisation. This includes elements such as signs and symbols, shared practices, and underlying assumptions of the business. This also includes the "unspoken" rules as well.
What is Organisational Behaviour?
Organisational behaviour is the understanding of human behaviour within an a workplace culture. This includes how people communicate with each other, whom they interact with, and how teams function.
Why is Culture so Vital?
By creating positive culture for your employees and measuring the effectiveness of organisational behaviour of your organisation, you are certain to see improvement in several sections of your business:
Retention of current employees – a positive company culture makes for happy employees and when the staff has job satisfaction, they are less inclined to see the grass greener on the other side.
Attraction of new employees – When current employees are pleased with their jobs or past employees were happy with the culture of the organisation, they will advertise it to people they know who are looking for work. Also, they will post positive reviews on job boards, making the organisation a company of choice and giving the company a larger pool of quality candidates to choose from when it comes to the hiring process.
Fostering positive morale – This not only assists with retaining employees but also helps improve customer service and productivity. A staff that is part of a positive company culture will be more engaged in their work and will strive to do the best they can.
What Should Be Measured to Evaluate Culture and Organisational Behaviour?
The goal of measuring culture and behaviour is to provide insights into employee engagement, motivation, and job satisfaction, which are key drivers of productivity and performance. When undertaken effectively it can improve HR functions and result in actionable insights.
Some of the key metrics that will provide you with critical insights include:
Productivity metrics
Employee turnover rates
Communication metrics
Number of employee referrals
Awareness of potential issues within the company, such as discrimination, harassment, or a toxic work environment, can negatively impact employee well-being and organisational performance. When problems are identified, cultural transformation can and must begin.
How to Measure Culture and Organisational Behaviour for a Hybrid Workforce?
The hybrid workforce is a norm in the modern workplace. Due to the uniqueness of the hybrid working, other factors must be taken into consideration when measuring the culture and organisational behaviour of the workforce. There are four elements to focus on to collect the most accurate data to make positive change.
Measure Psychological Safety
Psychological safety evaluates how and if employees openly contribute ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes without fearing repercussions. The level of psychological safety is how strongly they believe their input is welcomed and valued.
Measure Culture Elements and Values Rating
Culture elements and values ratings looks into individual topics and rates them in accordance with employees' views. These can include a breakdown of company communications, leadership effectiveness, or availability of job resources.
Measure Industry Norms
Every industry has unique challenges. What might be important to the healthcare industry's workforce may differ from what is essential to those in the tech industry. Some may value recognition more, while others value leadership support.
Interested in learning more about organisational culture? Take a look at our courses and resources in the myHRfuture Academy on measuring organisational culture
How Should Culture and Organisational Behaviour Be Measured?
By regularly measuring and monitoring culture and behaviour, HR professionals, people analytics, and the business can take proactive steps to create a positive and productive work environment. By taking employee attitudes and perceptions measurement, insight can be discovered into potential workplace issues that need to be addressed.
There are several ways to gather information on the company environment. This can be collected through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and observation. Surveys can be used to gather quantitative data on employee attitudes and perceptions of the organisation's culture and behaviour.
Four important types of surveys to consider include:
Employee Engagement Survey
An employee engagement survey allows you to measure if your employees are fully bought into the organisation and the company values and are willing to go that extra mile.
Cultural Survey
A cultural survey will enable you to review the unique beliefs, behaviours, and practices of your company against how they are perceived by you employees. These surveys are designed to assist organisations define and diagnose their organisation culture to determine if it is healthy and aligned with the business strategy.
How culture surveys work is they ask individuals questions that relate to their observation of collective patterns of behaviour within the business and are notably different to engagement surveys in that they don’t ask for an individual’s personal feeling but rather attempt to identify patterns of behaviour that they observe within the organisation and the potential sources of those patterns.
Climate Survey
These surveys measures on a team level, giving leaders an indicator on the views, attitudes, and sentiments of those who work in their teams and functions. Besides the benefits to the leadership teams in an understanding of their employee sentiment and how they work, climate surveys also offer opportunity for employees to share their opinions and thoughts in an official route, giving them the sense of being heard.
These surveys can provide a baseline of data for organisation. From the information collected here, businesses can perform people analytics so they can observe what is working with their company culture and strategise on what needs to be improved.
Pulse Survey
Pulse surveys are becoming more popular because they offer employers a snapshot in time on the engagement of their staff. These surveys are similar to engagement surveys, but they are given at a more regular and frequent interval.
Observation can also be used to gather data on specific behaviours and practices within the organisation. This can be collected by way of interviews and focus groups. This can provide a more in-depth understanding of employee experiences and perceptions.
How Leading Companies Are Measuring Culture and Organisational Behaviour
Through our Insight222 People Analytics Trends 2022 Report we found that Leading Companies who are delivering and communicating value and building positive employee engagement within their company share seven key characteristics.
One of those characteristics is their people analytics function measures and delivers financial value from people analytics activities. This means that leading companies invest more in people analytics, incorporate a data-driven culture within their organisation and follow five steps to making organisational culture tangible.
Come to a shared problem definition of culture
Set design principles upfront
Develop culture indicators
Gather data and test hypotheses
Implement and act
Two prime examples of leading companies driving employee experience through measuring culture and organisational behaviour are Google and Microsoft.
How Google Effectively Measures Their Culture and Organisational Behaviour
The Google team assessed their key business drivers through a pulse survey. Made up of 10 questions, the survey was designed to be simple and completed in 10 minutes. They measured the sentiment and moments that mattered to their workforce and ran the survey every other month for a year.
Remaining transparent, the people analytics team shared their results globally with employees to bring them along the journey. They used their insight to create actions and deliverables in the organisation through executive committees on culture as well as change agents.
How is Microsoft Transforming Culture by Measuring Culture and Organisational Behaviour?
Microsoft is an excellent example of a business that is effectively transforming its culture. by Microsoft bases its company culture on three core pillars, all grounded in the concept of a growth mindset that includes:
Being customer-obsessed
Fostering diversity & inclusion
Showing up as "One Microsoft"
To do this, they first researched what they wanted to create and where they currently were at. Afterwards, they conducted activities in the first nine months to define Microsoft's culture. From there, they made changes, such as replacing a closed-door four-hour meeting on the company directly with a one-week hackathon where teams from around the world were invited to contribute.
They learned that changing daily habits and the finer details had a great impact on changing company culture. They also communicated the importance of leadership support and granted their HR department the tools they required to continue building a data-driven culture for decision-making which also impacts there team from a career development perspective.
From attracting new employees to retaining current staff to fostering positive morale and job satisfaction within their workforce, leading companies are paving the way for more people analytic influence. From the data they find, they are also discovering new ways of supporting their workforce, including their hybrid workforce.
What Do Organisations Often Get Wrong About Culture?
Again, as much as organisations are learning about the importance of company culture, many businesses stumble when creating the right culture. Being aware of the mistakes others make and what a good culture and organisational behaviour looks like assists businesses with getting organisational behaviour right more quickly and keep it in place.
First, respect is the leading factor in determining the effectiveness of company culture. The number one reason that makes employees feel they are working in a poor company culture is when they experience disrespect. Respect is so important to employees that according to MITSloan Management Review, it is ranked 17.9 on the indicator of how the company culture is working. When employees are treated with empathy and are appreciated, they have a positive employee experience with the organisation and will describe the culture of the organisation as working.
Second is leadership, which is just as important. Employees are very aware that it is the C-suite of an organisation that first lay down the policies and procedures that run the organisation and that employees must work with. So, they are the first example of company leadership. If they put into place policies and procedures that don’t work, employees are quick to blame them. Leadership fails when it is not:
Supportive leaders – who assist with challenges and see to the wellbeing of their employees
Leaders live core values – it is sometimes assumed that leaders will not abide by their own core values, and this disappoints employees who are watching. But leaders who “walk the talk” gain employee appreciation.
But as damaging as lacking good leaders is to have poor leaders, leader that are:
Toxic managers – who are disruptive, causing stress on their staff and a poor culture because of their negative words and actions.
Unethical in behaviour – leader will disrupt any progress to a great company culture who practices bending the law. Once employees are asked or witness actions that violate their moral code, it becomes difficult for employees to trust that leader.
Next would be compensation & benefits. Though this may first not appear to factor into culture and organisational behaviour, it has a large influence due to employees depending on the added value of employment beyond the paycheck. That is why employers get this wrong. So, when looking at building the culture of an organisation, the business should have:
Learning and development – that creates opportunities for employees to upskill, so they have room for self-improvement and advancement.
Benefits – that effectively cover the worry over medical, family affairs, and employee wellbeing
Perks – that offer added benefits to working for the organisation such as flexible shifts, remote work options or concessions on vacation holidays.
What Skills Are Needed to Measure Culture and Organisational Behaviour?
Insight222 has identified nine key skills that every HR leader should have to succeed, and stay competitive in the workplace. Of those skills focusing on becoming data-driven will help you gain the knowledge of the best methods for measuring culture and organisational behaviour and the ability to analyse the data for actionable changes. When you gain confidence in using data every day, you will have the tools to improve the employee experience and build your company into a leading company.
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