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In times of high employee turnover, employee surveys can help your organization’s leadership feel the heartbeat of your employees. When successful, employee surveys can help to unveil facts that will enable any organization to drive increased employee satisfaction, improve employee engagement, and promote a culture that positively impacts employee experience in general.
Your organization’s culture defines what your organization is and what it stands for. This will reflect in how employees go about their duties, relate with other staff members, communicate, grow, and celebrate others. Implementing employee surveys helps you understand how employees view your culture and what to tweak to ensure everyone behaves and communicates in a way that represents what the firm stands for.
Why Employees Need to Understand Your Organizational Culture
Ideally, conversations about culture improvement should go on for as long as an organization is in business. Workers need to understand what the organization expects from them and what to expect from the organization. So, from time to time, it’s important to assess employees’ overall workplace experience using the right culture quality audits.
But that’s not all. To ensure the organization (speaking of all the different teams inside it) speaks and acts as a unified entity aiming for common goals, your company’s leadership, HR, and DEIB teams must help everyone in the organization identify and prioritize your culture goals. When your employees understand and align with your workplace culture, they're more likely to feel more comfortable, supported, and valued in the company. Organizational culture affects every aspect of your business, from organizational values and principles to social culture and customer experience.
Creating and maintaining healthy, inclusive cultures of diversity, equity, and belonging requires a nuanced, detailed understanding of your organizational culture as it exists at every level. This includes the macro/microculture and intended/permitted culture elements of your organization, as well as the social, operational, and ideological culture elements. The overall progress of the organization also depends on a company-wide understanding of and commitment to your organization’s culture.
What Does The Right Organizational Culture Look Like?
Note that company culture is typically unique to each company and great organizational cultures are not the same. This is because the values, beliefs, principles, and people in your organization are different from those of other organizations. However, it’s been shown that organizations that have great cultures have certain traits in common.
At FIC Human Resource Partners, we have, through our consultations and partnerships with different organizations, realized that culture-centric organizations are:
People-driven
Have clearly defined macro/microculture and intended/permitted cultures
Have an inclusive approach
High-performing
Gives everyone a sense of belonging
Supportive all employees
Flexible enough to accommodate different views
A culture improvement strategy
Your company culture defines how your employees relate with each other and get things done. It also influences the image of the organization, as perceived by customers and other stakeholders. It is the company’s personality. Whatever your cultural culture is, it should be representative of the company values and driven by strategic employee engagement.
This is why periodic surveys and culture quality audits that seek to understand how employees view the work culture and organizational values and principles can help foster a greater work culture. But to get an accurate grasp of employee understanding and perceptions of your company’s culture, you need to be asking the right questions.
6 Organization Culture Survey Strategies
From experience, we believe that a single culture improvement strategy aimed at the macroculture level and intended/permitted culture may not be enough to achieve a robust culture improvement. Actually, coordinating an implementation strategy that is tailored to the specific needs of multiple microcultures requires an integrated approach that keeps each initiative moving forward in harmony with the others.
At FIC Human Resource Partners, our Nuance Culture Consulting™ and Nuance Culture Surveys™ services are designed to offer that coordination seamlessly. We have split these surveys into two different categories based on their focus: The Organizational Culture Audits, which are focused on assessing key elements of your organizational culture; and the Employee Surveys, which are aimed at properly assessing employees' view of your company’s culture and how it has impacted their experiences.
1. Organizational Culture Audits
This includes:
Social Culture Quality Audit
The Social Culture Quality Audit™ measures six “social culture” aspects of your organization, namely: Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, Authenticity, and Psychological Safety. These can then be used to guide culture change and management efforts.
Operational Culture Quality Audit
The Operational Culture Quality Audit™ is one of our Nuance culture surveys designed to measure the strategy, structures, and systems of your organization. An understanding of the operational culture of an organization can help employees better project the right image of the organization in their relationship with each other and with external stakeholders.
Ideological Culture Quality Audit
To ensure that organizational cultures are viewed in a holistic way, you want to also get an accurate assessment of the ideological cultural qualities of the company. The Ideological Culture Quality Audit™ is designed to identify and define organizational values and principles, measure organization-wide commitment to the identified values and principles, and measure employee alignment with the identified values and principles.
2. Employee Surveys
Candidate Experience Matrix
The Candidate Experience Matrix™ is a tool that identifies the Operational and Ideological qualities that will enable candidates to thrive in your organization. The survey metrics can also be calibrated to suit a specific open position in your company, making it possible to evaluate the skills of each applicant for that position. This helps to shorten the hiring process, as HR executives and hiring managers can more quickly identify the best candidates for the open position.
Employee Exit Survey
The Employee Exit Survey uses the core Social Culture Quality Audit™ questions to capture the social culture experience of existing employees. It also helps to identify how your company policies, other staff members, job responsibilities, communication, compensation, and recognition impact each employee’s decision to exit the company.
Pulse and Engagement Surveys
Also included in our Nuance Culture Surveys™ is a unique or customized Pulse and Engagement Survey. This survey evaluates the rhythm amongst workers and overall engagement with your organization. It provides you with the in-the-moment insights you need to build a greater workplace culture.
The Nuance Difference
The Nuance Culture Surveys™ include a series of highly specialized audits and assessments that work in tandem with one another to provide your organization’s HR, leaders, and stakeholders with in-depth insight into your organizational culture. It moves from the macroculture level down through the microculture levels and well into individual employee culture experiences.
The importance of employee surveys when it comes to culture growth cannot be overemphasized. Employee surveys help leaders identify the obstacles and opportunities in their employees’ experience. But without the right strategy to support your improvement efforts, it might be very difficult to get a grasp of the actionable insights you need.
With accurate and custom assessments and surveys — and the ability to completely model organizational cultures — our Nuance Culture Surveys can support your company in your culture improvement efforts. Feel free to reach out to learn more about how you can leverage our Nuance Culture Consulting™ and Nuance Culture Surveys™ services to build an inclusive workplace where every employee, regardless of their background and experiences, has a sense of belonging that allows them to thrive.