5 Easy Steps to Measure the Success of your Company Culture

You’ve spent months delivering staff wellbeing initiatives, thinking up new ways to improve employee engagement, building recognition programs, and putting in place flexible working arrangements – all in the name of improving company culture. But how do you know if any of it has worked?

Other projects, like customer acquisition, a website redesign, or a new product line are tangible and can be measured quite easily by looking at the number of new customers, website traffic, or number of items sold to determine their success. However, company culture is touted as something that’s too abstract or subjective to be measured effectively.

And it’s easy to see why – there are so many elements that define company culture, that it’s near impossible to measure its success based on a single metric. But that’s not to say company culture shouldn’t be measured – it absolutely should – because without understanding the outcomes of your company culture strategy, you won’t know if these are making a positive (or negative) difference to your staff or business. It’s a bit of a catch-22.

Your company culture will contain many different elements

So how to measure Company Culture, when it consists of many different elements.

The trick is to think of company culture not as one huge strategy to untangle, but as a set of smaller initiatives. Breaking it down in this way allows you to analyse each initiative against its original goal or purpose, and identify if it was successful in fulfilling those. Let’s take a look at this in more detail.

1) Segment your company culture initiatives

The first step is to segment your company culture into smaller chunks. Look back at your original company culture manifesto to uncover what key elements make up your culture. Things like flexible working arrangements, opportunities for personal development, employee recognition programs, and employee wellbeing are all pertinent.

Segment your company culture into individual initiatives

2) Assign goals to each initiative

Yes your primary goal is to improve company culture. But what does that mean in real terms? If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to set relevant goals for each initiative that forms your wider company culture strategy.

For example, did you incorporate opportunities for personal development to boost innovation? Was better employee retention the endgame for flexible working arrangements? Were you looking to improve employee satisfaction by implementing a recognition program?

Have you assigned goals to your company culture initiatives? If not, now’s the time to do it!

3) Capture the data

Now that you have a list of measurable goals, you need a suitable forum for capturing different types of data. Adding surveys and polls on your employee intranet portal is a simple way to get feedback on areas such as employee satisfaction and happiness levels. Use e-forms to record new hires and leavers so that you can determine retention rates. And create discussion areas on your corporate social network for staff to propose new ideas.

Use surveys, e-forms, and discussion areas to capture feedback

4) Analyse the results

Armed with a set of measurable goals and some data to match, you’re ready to analyse the results. Look at retention rates before and after you started offering flexible working. Report on the number of new ideas that have been voiced since delivering learning opportunities. And measure the current mood on staff happiness. Gather all these pieces of the company culture puzzle and get ready to put it all together.

Analyse the data of each company culture initiative

5) Putting it all together

Now that you’ve assessed each initiative, combine and compare the results to uncover trends and get a full picture of your company culture’s success.

Only by breaking down your company culture into chunks are you able to get the metrics you need to start quantifying it. You can even compare these metrics against other data sources, such as customer acquisition, staff performance, and productivity levels, to see if culture has impacted on these areas too.