Cultural Assessment: The What, Why & How

What Is A Cultural Assessment?

Checking the health of your organisational culture can go by many names, but we call it a cultural assessment. There are a lot of tools available to do this work - some organisations use focus groups, team meetings, audits and more. Often a full cultural assessment is a big piece of work that can cost a lot of money - you will find consultancy firms charging thousands to support you through one. 

However, for many organisations the best way to complete an organisational cultural health assessment is a survey. This may be a one off survey, but ideally should be completed at regular intervals as your organisational health is a living thing that will change over time, so it’s important to continue to monitor and make adjustments. 

Our Cultural Assessment Survey

Understanding how your team thinks and feels about your organisational culture is key to creating a working environment where everyone can survive and thrive, and this is what our cultural assessment survey is designed to achieve. Each question has been designed by neuroscience and business experts to give you actionable insights. 

Your organisational culture will help to define who you are, what you do and how you do it, so it’s really important to get this right. Culture plays a key part in employee engagement and happiness, so if you can build a culture that works hard for you, you’ll reap the rewards when it comes to employee engagement, team productivity and, ultimately, your organisation’s bottom line. 

What Questions Are Included In Our Cultural Assessment Survey?

To give you the best possible insight into how your people think and feel about your organisational culture, our survey includes 22 questions based around all eight key neuroscience themes, which are the major drivers of happiness and engagement within your workplace. Each question asks your team to give a score between 1-10, giving you quantitative data allowing comparison between teams, locations and over time. 

To support the quantitative questions, we also give your people space to leave comments. This provides context to other feedback, and can highlight areas for improvement, wins since your last survey, and many other valuable insights. 

What Are The Benefits Of Our Cultural Assessment?

The stats around the importance of investing in your culture speak for themselves: 

• 79% of finance leaders said investors want more insight into culture - Accounting Weekly

• 66% of employees wanted to know about a company’s culture and values above all else when considering changing jobs - LinkedIn

• 56% of employees say company culture is more important than salary when it comes to job satisfaction - Glassdoor

• 82% believe that culture is a potential competitive advantage - Deloitte

Our Cultural Assessment survey is designed to lift the hood on your organisational culture and give you the tools you need to dial in on your strengths and weaknesses. This guarantees an increased return on investment, as you’ll be able to key in your work around what your people want and need!

What Are The Limitations Of Our Cultural Assessment Survey?

Simply surveying your team won’t improve your cultural health in and of itself. Instead, the data must be analysed and used to inform an ongoing action plan. Luckily, our platform is designed to make reporting easier, and comes with all the tools you need to create a bespoke action plan that will help you supercharge your organisational culture. 

The Cultural Assessment survey is a larger survey designed to be sent out once (maybe twice) a year. This means it gives a snapshot of what your people are thinking and feeling. Understanding how your team are thinking and feeling on an ongoing basis is really important and so you will need a different survey (like our Employee Voice survey) to meet this need. 

A one off annual survey isn’t enough to build a culture of listening within your organisation. This is why our platform gives you access to a wider range of surveys which are designed to give you insights into specific pain points around your organisation’s journey, or individual employee lifecycle. This will build a wider context which it is impossible to do in a more generic cultural health survey. 

Why Should You Use Our Cultural Assessment Survey?

Our Cultural Assessment survey offers so much more than just insights into your cultural health. Here are our top 5 benefits from using our survey for your organisation: 

1. Understand employee engagement and happiness - most cultural health surveys don’t look at both the head and the heart, we’re the world’s first employee surveying platform that allows you to see both. This means that you’ll be able to see how your employees think and feel about your organisational culture and what they want and need to succeed. By taking both together you’ll uncover a deeper understanding of what drives your people and how you can create a working environment that nurtures their success. 
   

2. Uncover actionable insights from your first survey send - there’s no need to fine-tune our surveys as they’ve been designed by experts to uncover the detail you need from the get-go. Each question helps you to uncover areas where you’re performing well and where you may need to pay extra attention to get the results you’re looking for. This means that there’s no wasted time with surveys that don’t give the feedback you need to create meaningful organisational change. 
   

3. Bust data silos with our holistic approach - our API integration allows you to bring different kinds of HR data together in a way that leverages your organisational insights. This means you can filter your data according to your organisation’s needs. Not only this, but every question within our platform is tagged with a neuroscience theme, which allows you to view all your surveys together and understand themes and trends across survey sends. 
   

4. Guarantee anonymity within our platform - you need accurate data, and the best way to do this is to build trust with your feedback platform. We take anonymity seriously, which means that you will get candid feedback that will accurately reflect what is happening within your organisation. This allows you to create an action plan that works for the unique needs of your organisation and team. 
   

5. Open up other surveys - our platform is designed to integrate any of our surveys together within your listening programme. Lots of our customers use our Cultural Assessment survey in conjunction with our Employee Voice survey for example. This allows you to track the impact of changes and improvements that you make off the back of your Cultural Assessment Survey. 

What Actionable Insights Might You Gain From Our Cultural Assessment Survey? 

Our Cultural Assessment Survey is designed to give you insights into the key drivers of workplace happiness and employee engagement, this means that some of the insights you might get are: 

1. Key Drivers Of Happiness & Engagement - every question is linked to our neuroscience methodology, which means that you can understand which drivers of happiness and engagement are most important to your people. This is vital in focusing your attention on the areas that are going to make the biggest impact for the unique make-up of your organisation, allowing you to maximise return on investment. 

2. Key Strengths And Weaknesses -  Your feedback will give you insight into areas where your organisation is performing well and areas where you have room for improvement. This means you can celebrate your successes as well as driving change. This can do amazing things for team morale!

3. Patterns & Trends - Many of our customers are able to see that particular teams, departments or locations perform well in certain areas while others don’t. By identifying these patterns you can apply learnings across your organisation without the need to reinvent the wheel. 

4. Successes Within Your Programme - By running the same survey multiple times, you will be able to see the ways in which your action plan has borne fruit. Not only will this demonstrate that you are listening to your team, but you will also be able to prove the impacts of your work. Plus, you can make incremental changes - our CEO and co-founder, Matt Phelan, is always keen to remind people that happiness is a journey not a destination. 

5. Questions To Explore Further - A single survey won’t give you all the answers, but you will be able to uncover areas where you want to dig deeper. Our library of pre-built surveys will give you the tools you need to uncover further context to help you build a clearer picture of these areas. 

What Impacts Have Our Customers Seen From Using Our Cultural Assessment Survey?

Here are some of the amazing changes customers have noticed and made when using our Cultural Assessment survey: 

• “We use The Happiness Index in a variety of different ways. We use it for cultural assessment surveys and culture event feedback which is so important to us. We are able to track sentiment across the business from different audiences in different ways - as and when we need to.” Caroline Ward, Head of Culture & Internal Communication at Slater & Gordon

• Using the Cultural Assessment survey “helps to build trust and closeness between leadership and staff. All changes that we are making are linked to surveys. This helps to reinforce to everyone that they have been listened to and that by taking part in the listening programme, you are helping create a more positive culture.”

• Our own HR team used our cultural assessment data to build out our personal development programme. Find out more by checking out this webinar recording. 

How Can You Make Sure You’re Successful With Our Cultural Assessment Survey?

Just running a cultural health survey isn’t enough to guarantee return on investment. Here are some steps you should consider taking to get the results you and your organisation need. 

1. Commit To Regular Communications - your communications plan is vital for the success of your survey. Both pre- and post-survey communications should be considered when planning in your activity. Ensuring that you’re clear with what you’re asking of your people and when, and what you’re planning to do with the feedback will improve response rates. Then it’s also vital to communicate what you’ve learned and your next steps afterwards to continue to build trust. 

2. Build A Realistic Action Plan - Once you’ve gathered insight, it’s time to create a realistic action plan. This should take into account resources available to you (both financial and time wise) and should have regular check-ins to make sure you’re still on track to deliver what your people want and need in order to succeed. 

3. Don’t Run The Survey In Isolation - Our Cultural Assessment Survey works best when it is run within a larger listening strategy. Whether you commit to also running Employee Voice, or whether you prefer employee advocacy groups, leadership open office hours, or other listening strategies, you should be trying to build a wider listening plan. 

4. Repeat Survey Regularly - Running our Cultural Assessment survey at least once a year will help you to prove impacts and also isolate new or returning issues. This will mean that you’re able to continue to monitor the cultural health of your organisation. 

For more information about building a culture that works hard for your organisation and your people, why not check out our eBook: Culture Playbook: Build An Engaged & Happy Workplace.

What Other Surveys Should You Run With Our Cultural Assessment Survey?

An annual cultural health survey, like our Cultural Assessment survey, can give incredible insights. But to maximise impact, we recommend using it alongside some of our other employee surveys. The most popular to use to improve culture and build employee happiness and engagement are: 

• Employee Voice - Understand your people’s needs in real-time using always-on listening. Learn more. 

• Equality of Voice - Listen to your people and understand what they want and need to feel like they truly belong. Learn more.

• Wellbeing - Identify your organisation’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to wellbeing and mental health to build and maintain a happy, healthy workforce. Learn More.

If you want to learn more about how our Cultural Assessment survey could supercharge your organisation’s culture, why not chat to one of our experts? Book in a call today.