Building a business culture is hard. There are so many factors to consider when creating shared values and goals across your organization. Defining those goals is easy, implementing the process required to build and evaluate those goals is the hard part. How do you know that the culture you are building is moving in the right direction? How do you know that your cultural investments will have the necessary return on investment in collaboration and productivity?
Culture is the backbone of every organization, but leadership does not always know how to contribute to and evaluate the effectiveness of powerful company culture. Every business and leadership school teaches it, but none of these programs tell you how to evaluate it or quantify its effectiveness.
Most companies evaluate their company culture by evaluating engagement. Unfortunately, one of the few ways that companies evaluate engagement is with employee surveys and the current approach to employee surveys does not provide a complete picture of team engagement. With large sample sizes, you might be able to get employee sentiment across the organization, but it is difficult to evaluate individual engagement. Another way to evaluate engagement is by using less scalable methods like observation, testing, and interviews. Here are some common ways the companies evaluate employee engagement.
1. Observe Behavior
Watch employee engagement during office meetings, company-wide events, and conference calls. It might seem painful to keep notes, but it is likely the most accurate insight that you will be able to get.
2. Evaluate Cultural Narratives
Cultural narratives are the glue that holds companies together. They are the founding stories, the challenges that leadership has overcome, and the success stories that align the organization. Testing employees on the narrative can give you a sense of its distribution.
3. Evaluate Leadership Alignment
How do employees see the alignment of leadership’s values and the values of the organization? Often times leadership’s behavior and the culture of the organization are not parallel. Surveys can give you these types of insights.
4. Ask Employees To Interpret Company Values
Testing team members is a key way to understand if your value system is clear and understood by the entire organization.
5. Generate Scalable Engagement Data
There are very few ways to get a clear evaluation of an individual engagement other than manually observing and interpreting the results. ChatFox provides a way to evaluate team engagement from a high level and individual level at scale. Our chats are built to drive employee engagement. When the leadership team decides on initiatives like ChatFox they are encouraging team member participation. If team members are not willing to participate that is the first step in identifying how engaged a team member is. Management can then look at weekly engagement charts to evaluate how the team as a whole is engaging with each other. On an individual level our points system enables management to know which team members have the most participation and which team members have the least participation.
6. Evaluate Company Metrics Like Turnover, Internal Mobility & Profitability
If your profitability and team continue growing with limited turnover then you are definitely doing something right. Profitability is based on continued revenue growth and lower costs. In order to grow profitability you need to make sure that your employees are delivering and the cost of doing so is not too high. Turnover is a cost which you can look at on the income statement by evaluating recruitment costs. Internal mobility shows that you have identified team members with the right personalities, skills, training and motivation to growth within the organization.
Conclusion
Team engagement and more specifically team culture is difficult to evaluate. At a high level knowing that team members are collaborating and creating synergy shows that you are doing something right, but does not provide details into what is driving that engagement. With the current employee engagement tools it is still a challenge to know what exactly is working and not working. Adding ChatFox to your toolkit will give you deeper insights into remote team engagement and individual employee participation.
- https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/how-to-build-a-healthy-work-culture/?program=7013A000000mweBQAQ&utm_bu=CR&utm_campaign=71700000059189235&utm_adgroup=58700005410222821&utm_content=39700049736551248&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=adwords&utm_term=p49736551248&utm_kxconfid=s4bvpi0ju&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI16eOiri36QIVQhh9Ch2l7gWQEAAYASAAEgLlQPD_BwE
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/alankohll/2018/08/14/how-to-build-a-positive-company-culture/#6d564d3c49b5
- https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/About-Deloitte/gx-core-beliefs-and-culture.pdf
- https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239475
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/2019/12/16/10-proven-methods-for-measuring-the-roi-of-company-culture/#3cd43cdb4451
- https://www.inc.com/jacob-morgan/the-big-problem-with-employee-engagement.html
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathymillerperkins/2019/10/12/assessing-organizational-culture-made-simple/#6cbf1d5534cc
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/markmurphy/2018/09/09/this-mistaken-belief-is-ruining-most-employee-engagement-surveys/#74eb9fe37a1d
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