Why Culture Surveys are Critical to your Organisation’s Success.
The culture of an organisation directly affects it’s performance and the bottom line. Improved performance is a direct result of increased employee engagement. Data from Queens University Centre for Business Venturing shows that an organisation with an engaged culture reaps many benefits, including:
- 20% less absenteeism
- 26% less employee turnover
- 15% greater employee productivity
- 30% greater customer satisfaction levels
- 100% more unsolicited employment applications
Therefore, if your organisation is looking to increase it’s performance, it needs to improve on it’s employee engagement. Culture surveys provide you with tangible objectives for change. By repeating your survey regularly, it is possible to measure progress and identify key areas which require additional focus, in turn, increasing both performance and profits.
A culture survey will enable you to focus on the most critical aspects of your company’s culture, which will drive results and enable you to make the behavioural changes, which can have the most significant impact.
Considerations
The creation and deployment of an employee engagement survey is a reasonably simple process. The ways in which the survey is positioned with employees can be more complex:
- a statement of purpose
- policy and procedure
- respecting individual anonymity
- how the results and outcomes will be communicated
- commitment to action on the part of the organisation
In our extensive experience, the success of an intervention pivots on the extent to which the above matters have been anticipated and planned for and how employee expectations are set by the organisation.
Recommendation
We work with organisations to ensure that appropriate policies and procedures are in place to facilitate the successful execution of your survey. This initial stage would involve reviewing the way that the initiative was described. This would include:
- why the survey was being conducted
- what was being requested of each individual
- how the opinions of each individual would be collected
- how it would be processed and by whom
- how the results of the survey would be used by the organisation
- how the results and consequent actions/initiatives would be communicated to employees
The above points represent critical steps in ensuring that the survey has a net positive outcome for the organisation. The risk of not giving due consideration to these points is a profound and negative impact on attitudes and morale.
Questions used in the survey are tailored to the organisation, this is not a one size fits all approach, because of course no two organisations are the same, nor are their objectives, goals and priorities.
Typically, we work with organisations to disseminate the survey and gather the results, but this can also be done exclusively by the organisation, or by us, if there are particularly strong preferences either way. We analyse the results and report to key stakeholders on:
- The whole organisation
- Department by department
- Job level
We present the report of the results in an readily understandable format, identifying implications and with suggestions on future actions.
Organisational Solutions Ltd – Organisational Psychologists and Experts in Culture Surveys