It’s no secret that, if leveraged correctly, company culture can drive business productivity and growth. Indeed, researchers at Columbia University have found that employee turnover can decrease from an average of 48.4% in organisations that are lax about culture to just 13.9% in organisations that care, highlighting culture’s centricity in holding onto talented staff.
Likewise, Gallup has long reported that leaders who prioritise culture experience a 33% rise in revenue, putting an end to the age-old dichotomy of choosing either profitable expansion or people.
The importance of culture
The truth is that it’s now perfectly possible to achieve both. In fact, the two go hand in hand, as when employees’ behaviours are aligned with the company’s mission and culture, they feel more valued and trusted, making them more likely to go above and beyond. This, in turn, contributes to higher levels of productivity, innovation and efficiency, not to mention minimising recruitment and training costs. In other words, culture truly is the key to success, influencing an organisation’s ability to thrive in a competitive market.
Despite this centricity, however, many leaders continue to rely on outdated methods to gauge their culture, missing the mark on what truly makes a thriving workplace. Therefore, for culture to really inspire real change and elevate outcomes, we need a major shift from engagement surveys and verbatim feedback to modern, data-driven approaches.
A tradition of failure
Although they can provide a useful snapshot, broad surveys and periodic assessments simply aren’t enough for an effective diagnosis of culture. This is where most companies fall short, introducing theoretical measures for growth and improvement without first understanding the starting point. Without this clear picture, it’s impossible to plan for appropriate action, the result being a series of panicked attempts to pick up the pieces when things go wrong, rather than taking responsible action.
However, by switching from these outdated methods, which limit results to mere superficial changes, leaders can move from the reactive to the proactive, ultimately improving long-term performance.
Developing a clear picture
The first step towards meaningful cultural enhancement, then, is to develop a clear, meaningful picture of your current culture. This means moving away from emotional judgements, which can be interpreted with bias, towards a more objective approach – recognising that cultural traits, defined as collective behaviours are not inherently good or bad. Rather, they must be viewed through the lens of alignment with your unique organisational goals and values.
No more labels
Often, the drive to label cultural behaviours as positive or negative can cloud judgment. For instance, a high-pressure work environment might be seen as inherently detrimental in some contexts, despite potentially being the catalyst for high performance and innovation. By adopting a more objective, data-driven understanding of where you are now, it’s possible to better understand the critical cultural attributes required to achieve your company goals.
Indeed, objective understanding is not about striving for an idealised version of culture but recognising gaps and leveraging existing strengths. Likewise, it’s about learning what your culture is, without necessarily pushing for constant improvement, in order to provide a stable foundation upon which to build genuine performance and engagement.
Aligning purpose and priorities
The next step, then, is to look at overcoming any cultural challenges standing in between where you want to be and where you are now. This requires a clear sense of purpose and strategic alignment of organisational priorities.
Take Google, for instance. Aiming to organise the world’s information, make it universally accessible, the tech giant’s strategic goals are centred around a culture of user experience and innovation. This is reflected in its internal culture of employee empowerment, with things like the 20%-time policy – where employees spend a fifth of their time working on projects they are truly passionate about – serving to encourage the risk-taking behaviours central to innovation and creativity.
Naturally, what works well for Google might destroy a more risk-averse company, so it’s important to use both company identity and data-driven insights to define your own personalised culture goals. Companies that successfully do this see greater employee investment and receptivity to change – helping them to overcome the number-one barrier to transformation: people. This alignment also helps to create a more cohesive work environment, where every employee understands their role in the larger mission. It’s simply a question of communication.
Prioritising employee investment
Whatever your goals, engagement naturally follows cultural alignment as employees feel included, seen and valued. Prioritising factors like employee involvement, receptivity and continuous training in your culture thus creates an ecosystem where engagement thrives organically, with metrics like uptake on workshops and webinars being the factors and behaviours we should be looking to track.
Actionable insights through data-driven methods
Modern measurement and analytics tools provide the data insights you need to create a genuinely effective, actionable culture alignment plan. By continually measuring and analysing specific, relevant cultural metrics, you can identify trends, pinpoint issues and implement successful strategies, allowing you to move beyond the superficial fixes offered by traditional methods towards a culture of continual improvement and adaptability.
It’s time to bring the focus back to culture in a way that is both innovative and grounded in reality and data. Only then can we unlock the true potential of our organisations, ensuring sustainable success and growth.
Charlie Coode
Culture15 is an innovative SaaS business that provides organisations with a rigorous platform to measure and manage culture, and has since helped more than 50 organisations, across 65 countries, put culture at the heart of business performance through the power of technology, and data.
