Whichever one it was that Peter Drucker, the management guru, actually quoted….he was probably right!

One major criticism in the world of culture and leadership has always been about its focus on measurement / monitoring of activity,  and separately sentiment. The former sometimes involves proudly drawing up a laundry list of completed tasks (“we’ve rolled out x number of leadership development courses!”) but with no real clarity on the “so what?” – activity does not guarantee outcome. The latter  (engagement questions like: “tell us how our culture feels to you”) is notoriously subjective, although how people feel is their reality so it is critical, but it can fluctuate for reasons outside of the employer’s control. 

Whilst there is absolutely value in listening and responding appropriately to feedback from your people, and we would advocate it, it doesn’t help answer the biggest question: the impact of your efforts on your business.

It’s more than just purpose, vision and values

Graduating beyond the culture 101 of Purpose, Vision and Values is crucial. They are important but not the end of the story. Going deeper, exploring the norms, assumptions and beliefs gives great insight into the ‘why’ of the culture.  Beyond that, and perhaps the Holy Grail of culture, is curating a culture that enables your business strategy and a dashboard of meaningful metrics to track progress – progress with your culture journey and the impact on key business metrics.

I’m aware that it’s not always easy to separate out causation from correlation but in our bespoke culture dashboards we tend to be able to identify early warning signals that enable timely preventative action to be taken. This means you can avoid low employee satisfaction impacting customer satisfaction a few weeks later. Poor leadership can be addressed to sidestep reduced profitability by quarter end. A drop in internal collaboration resulting in delayed project delivery or customer satisfaction can be identified. Confusion over a business’ identity post-merger can be spotted in time to swerve a drop in sales.

With also increased scrutiny in all businesses from the regulators who see ‘culture’ as being central to their approach, clear measurement of certain attributes such as diversity, equity and inclusion, psychological safety, and sustainability are even more important.

Real-time monitoring of the metrics and understanding their true meaning and impact enables leaders to make much smarter people decisions.

Companies who have a culture dashboard:

• Have an early warning system to let them know what’s about to go wrong and give them time to fix it
• Can ensure transparency and accountability for culture at all levels of the organisation creating a psychologically safe environment
• Have a way to enhance the quality of decision-making as decisions are data-driven
• Are better able to align culture to achieve strategic goals
• Are able to correlate culture to business performance

It’s very hard to claim that this is an exact science but without measuring at all, you have no hope of improving, managing or doing ‘the right thing’.