Great culture is defined by leadership and employees want to lead by example behaviour. It is critical for the bottom line of businesses that leaders actively manage culture. CultureIQ, the strategic culture management platform transforming data into actions announced the results of a survey, of 579 HR professionals, conducted in tandem with HR.com.
The respondents varied across a range of industries and company sizes, resulting in how organizations rate their company culture, what is vital for creating and sustaining a positive and productive culture and actions that can be taken to leverage culture to benefit business.
“Streamlining company culture is an ongoing process and HR departments and C-suite executive leadership are critical components in forging an engaged and productive culture,” said Greg Besner, CEO of CultureIQ.
Many contradictions exist for HR practitioners and leaders dedicated to strong and positive corporate cultures. Other results from Employee Culture: A Closer Look include:
Employees need their employers to believe in them, give them responsibility to perform and create broader sense of connections with colleagues and community. With a strong correlation between corporate culture and organizational performance, human resource professionals cite the difficulty in uncovering nuanced characteristics necessary to reach and maintain a positive culture.
One key way to measure culture is to do a regular culture assessment, and 55 percent of respondents are on the right track by conducting employee engagement surveys. In addition to culture assessment, you can gain a better understanding of your culture through hosting employee focus groups, observing employee behaviours, and collecting regular, systematic feedback.
See: Recognising 10 Best Firms in Singapore with Great Workplace Culture
This will give you a clear understanding on the best ways to leverage your strengths and uncover any key opportunities for improvement. Ultimately, this helps you focus on actions that will improve both the employee experience and business results.
Building and maintaining a strong, vibrant and positive culture is not easy. It’s nearly impossible without the full support and involvement of senior leadership. These hindrances in an organization culture are so powerful that they can result in a downfall of the organization’s business.
If found earlier, it is possible to address the root causes and do the needful to build a strong culture and thereby achieve strategic organizational goals. Only 36 percent believe their culture is strong or very strong. Senior leadership is the primary driver of culture.
Leadership buy-in was cited as the primary hindrance to promoting or strengthening culture. Lack of leadership support is the primary reason organizations do not effectively or actively manage efforts to improve their culture.
Corporate culture is proven to be a driver of organizational success and profitability. However, the factors that influence culture are nuanced and complex. Recognising disconnects between awareness of the value and importance of culture and leadership’s role as a positive factor will not be simple or an easy hurdle to clear.
CultureIQ uses 10 distinct and measurable categories to make this process easier including innovation, support, mission and value alignment, responsibility, agility, wellness, collaboration, performance focus, communication and work environment to derive data insights and craft proactive strategies to align culture and leverage positive workplace dynamics as a business strategy.
Also read: Wellbeing will be the Key Driver of Workplace Culture and Employee Engagement in 2017
Feature image credit: Freepik
