A while back wrote an ebook sharing my thoughts on how to measure a team’s culture. These thoughts came from a few different experiences I’ve had over the years. I’ve been keenly interested in organizational and team culture for many years. A few years ago I was exposed to the idea of the NPS score (aka, Net Promoter Score) to measure sentiment (would you recommend someone buy this product, or shop here, or work here?). I saw a different application of this to measure employee sentiment, which was quickly dubbed the employee net promoter score.
Frankly, I’m not impressed with the NPS format to get to the heart of the matter.
There are only two questions but I think they are too simplistic. Of course, the purpose of the questions are to be simple, but I think you need to get better, more targeted, and more comprehensive information to have something useful as a manager or leader.
How to Measure a Team’s Culture: The eBook
This ebook helps you measure culture in a quantitative and qualitative way. This is important because it allows you to get trends and measure improvement while still getting the substantial feedback you need to understand why people are giving you the scores you get.
It’s critical that you have quantitative results from your culture measurement tools so you can understand if you are okay, and if over time you are improving or not. These trends should be talked about at leadership and executive meetings. It might take a while to get executives to buy into “culture,” or improving culture, or things along those lines, but the focus on and investment in culture can have serious impacts on your top and bottom lines. Every executive should be interested in that!
This ebook is a short read. When trying to figure out how to measure a team’s culture you want to make sure you are asking the right questions. I propose four specific, and still simple, questions you can send out to your team.
Culture is hard. Understanding it, changing it, guiding it… it’s all hard. It’s been hard to define, which makes it hard to measure.
The four questions in this eBook help you understand and measure it much more effectively. You should get information you can make decisions on, and even act on.
As a bonus, I share ideas on what to do once you get information. I’ll give you a hint: When people answer any questions about your culture in a survey, they are risking their job. They are risking their brand and perhaps promotions. The survey responses they give you are a gift. Too often these gifts are discarded. The person sharing feedback feels like their input has been ignored.
Please, please don’t do this. Please take every bit of feedback seriously. Let your employees know you value their thoughts. They’ll feel more comfortable sharing them in the future, which is exactly what you need to improve your organization’s culture.
Download the ebook that answers how to measure a team’s culture here.
