WITHOUT A DOUBT, THIS IS THE MOST COMMON QUESTION I AM ASKED BY REPRESENTATIVES OF ORGANISATIONS WHO DO NOT HAVE A STRONG UNDERSTANDING OF COMPANY CULTURE AND PERFORMANCE.

ASKING THIS QUESTION REVEALS THAT PEOPLE ARE NEW TO THE CULTURE CONVERSATION, OR DO NOT REALLY UNDERSTAND WHAT CULTURE IS AND WHAT IT DOES.

My standard reply is “You can’t measure culture”.

Having stated this opinion I often pause to let people play with the response. The very fact they have asked how to measure culture indicates that they already assume culture can be measured. When I suggest it can’t, often people need a few moments to process this concept.

BECAUSE ORGANISATIONS ARE DESIGNED FUNDAMENTALLY FOR MAXIMISING CONTROL, THEY LIKE TO MEASURE EVERYTHING TO DETERMINE TO WHAT EXTENT THEY ARE IN CONTROL.

To this end, they will measure all sorts of things including:

• Cash flow
• Productivity
• Market share
• Time management
• Management feedback
• Staff engagement
• Sales and revenue
• Costs and savings
• Returns on investment
• Growth or shrinkage
• Customer call cycles
• Customer complaints
• Health and safety incidents
• Customer retention
• Margins
• Product lifespans
• Absenteeism
• Staff turnover
• Key Performance Indicators
• Defects, delays and wastage
• Fuel and lighting efficiency

If it exists in an organisation’s world they will try to find a way to measure it. These measurements are extremely useful and informative and are wonderful indicators of strategic and tactical progress or regression.

WHAT MAKES THESE THINGS MEASURABLE IS THAT THEY ARE TANGIBLE, LINEAR OR NUMERIC BY NATURE.

CULTURE IS NOT.

You cannot measure culture, just as you cannot measure love or pride,
or commitment, or willingness, or motivation, or symbolism, or family,
or humour, or courage, or meaning, or spirit de corps, or a sense of identity,
or the depth of care, or empathy, or compassion, or kindness, gratitude, effort

fun, frustration, excitement, disappointment, friendship, and a thousand other wonderful experiences human beings can have during any given workday.

IT’S BEST TO PUT DOWN YOUR CALCULATOR, YOUR MEASURING TAPE AND SPEEDOMETER, SPREADSHEET AND SURVEYS, BECAUSE YOU CAN’T MEASURE CULTURE.

If you think you can, take a closer look at what you think you’re measuring. I guarantee you it’s not culture. It might be an opinion of culture. It might be a look of culture. It might be the number of people who embody the culture… but it won’t be culture itself.

You can’t measure culture. The fact you can’t measure culture explains why traditional tribes have never used engagement surveys or need to, and yet they typically have more cohesive and effective cultures than the majority of organisations.

You will never see a traditional culture benchmark its culture against another culture. To even contemplate this instantly reveals the notion as nonsensical. Why would a Zulu want to benchmark themselves against an Apache or Navajo?

HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH COMPANY CULTURE.

You can identify how your culture impacts positively or negatively on the delivery or non-delivery of your organisation or department’s Key Performance Indicators (KPI). For example, if a KPI of your organisation is customer retention, you could explore things like what ways does your company culture impact on your ability to achieve this KPI.

You might investigate areas of culture such as:

• People’s willingness to serve customers.

• People’s tone of voice when serving customers (friendly, cold, standoffish)

• People’s willingness to collaborate and assist each other to fix a customer’s problem

• People’s friendliness and warmth when connecting with customers

• People’s ability and willingness to remember and use customers’ names

• Whether your culture is mostly focused inwards on itself, or outward towards the customers’ needs, moods and problems.

• Whether high levels of absenteeism and staff turnover affect your customers’ experience of consistency, and whether the high absenteeism and staff turnover are due to the fact your employees don’t like or don’t feel safe in the workplace culture they are part of.

So it’s best to think along the lines of – we can’t measure culture but we can explore its impact on those things we do measure. As an exercise, consider what are five KPI’s in your organisation that you believe are highly likely to be impacted on by your culture? Why is this? How is culture impacting on the KPI’s? What could you do with your culture to improve or reverse this impact for the better?