Organizational Excellence Series – Quantifying Company Culture

As much as a company with a good corporate culture can thrive even in difficult times, a firm with a dysfunctional culture can stumble in growing markets and thereby delay implementation of the value creation plan.

Assessing the aspects of culture which drive decision-making and implementation, enables PE-sponsors to understand how much time and effort is needed to activate the organization and accelerate full potential plan implementation.

Company culture assessment best practices include:

USE THE WEB

Company culture leaves a mark on everything it touches, especially on social media and ranking websites. The corporate website is full of information about the organization and a good place to start for understanding what is important for an organization and what not. How is the CEO ranked? What is the atmosphere at work? What is important during the recruiting process? The anonymous voices of employees can indeed be a powerful source of information on company culture.

LOOK AT HR PROCESSES

Assessing the maturity of HR processes is an excellent way to understand what value the company places on human capital and on the maturity of leadership processes. Do they have any leadership and development program? If yes, who are the participants and what are the goals? How are people hired? What competencies do they look for? How are people fired? Understanding the role and quality of HR processes is an important input to understanding corporate culture.

UTILIZE PLANT / OFFICE VISITS

Plant tours are guided, but nonetheless worth the time. During a visit, sponsors and senior executives have the opportunity to observe subtle but important behaviors. Are break-rooms and the common kitchen clean? Does each employee take personal responsibility? What are the signals from the body language? Do employees run away from the visiting group? Or, is there positive acknowledgement of the important role each employee plays? For the careful observer, the reaction of employees to visiting executives is very revealing about the culture.

LEVERAGE HISTORICAL EMPLOYEE SURVEYS

The results of anonymous engagement surveys can be helpful for understanding company culture in general, and what employees’ key pain points and motivators are.

UTILIZE HUMATICA’S ALTUS BEHAVIOURAL BENCHMARKING SURVEY

The ultimate precise way to quantify a company’s culture in the context of its ability to execute the value creation plan is to utilize Humatica’s Altus employee survey to measure the quality of behaviours which drive the collective ability of teams and the organization to make and implement decisions. This approach allows a fast and pragmatic focus on measures which will specifically improve the fundamental capability of the organization to implement change.

This article is part of our series on Organizational Excellence.

Other articles in the series:

• Riding private equity’s third wave of value growth
• Leadership team excellence: It’s not just the CEO
• Best practice guide to assessing leadership teams
• Middle management: Where the rubber hits the road
• Middle management: How to “kick the tyres” before driving
• Company Culture: How it drives value creation