Is your culture survey telling you what’s really going on below the surface?

Surveys are the tool organisations use to “measure culture” and provide insights to shape, tailor and improve the environment and the way work gets done, but they don’t work in isolation and here’s 7 reasons why…

1. Trust – if your culture already has trust issues, or a lack of confidence in the leadership, then you are unlikely to be told the truth, fear will override for most (read our article about trust & confidence here), and whilst on trust, if you have high trust and psychological safety, you don’t need anonymity;

2. Confidence – there needs to be a real belief that if I’m going to the trouble of telling you what needs to be done differently, you are going to listen and do something about it;

3. Confidentiality – despite the great lengths to which we go to assure everyone it is confidential, many just don’t believe it (also a symptom of point 1);

4. Fatigue – over surveyed environments are just sick of telling you so they will either not bother, or skew the answers to make it go away or for fun; and this is the problem with pulse surveys, just because they are shorter doesn’t make it better;

5. Demographics – the baseline data is unreliable if you are in a growth phase, driving change and/or have high turnover - it is almost impossible to effectively measure a shift unless all things are equal, or the variables are appropriately contextualised in a statistically valid way;

6. Right Issues – it is almost impossible (without creating a survey of 1000’s of questions) to truly get to the heart of the culture hits and misses; and

7. Misleading – this is a data source that is just too easily manipulated, allows for prejudice and bias and therefore can be interesting, sometimes entertaining, but unreliable.

Take this example…

A survey conducted of a large call centre identified that the call centre staff were, on the whole, happy. They loved the company, the job and the leadership - high scores in all engagement and alignment factors. In the typical post survey “workshops” conducted by HR where everyone is invited to discuss the results, the team nodded and smiled, were interactive and congenial. They were congratulated and sent back to work - anointed as high performing. There was the obligatory back slapping for the Manager who was heralded as an exemplary example, and the HR team moved on – nothing to see here.

But the real story was very different.

A few months later, a substantial financial error had been identified in an audit. The ensuing investigation unveiled that the call centre billing system was not being used correctly. The reason for this was a culture of fear and systematic bullying by the Manager (who had stood over people whilst they completed the survey). The turnover stats told the story, yet HR did not look at this data input. The team was under extreme pressure, the environment high stress, the mandate to meet impossible KPIs that had not been endorsed by the company. The team had no choice but to find workarounds, not knowing that the workarounds resulted in millions of dollars of over billing. There was a toxic blame culture with constant team infighting and savage competitiveness in an effort to outdo each to survive and avoid the wrath of the manager. With no exaggeration, there was a story of two team members having a physical fight in the middle of an afternoon. Both the culture survey and the workshop proved entirely ineffective and inaccurate.

I started working in the era before fancy software programs were used to hear from the workforce. In my day, we just asked! We also used rudimentary methods - those of my vintage will recall the old “suggestion box”.  Under lock and key people would scratch on a piece of paper all sorts of ideas and thoughts (including rude and offensive - equally insightful!) and sometimes profoundly genius.  This old fashioned (eek, non-digital) approach provided way more insight than what I’ve ever had from the new fandangle software programs for a number of reasons; it wasn’t forced; it wasn’t restricted to highly orchestrated questions; it wasn’t event based; there were no participation targets; it was organic; and in my opinion, just better intel. It provided great insight into what was really going on beneath the surface because people weren’t forced to contribute.

Don’t use culture surveys if you really want to know what’s going on beneath the surface.

Having said all that, surveys do have a place. They can be a good way to get a benchmark of where to start as long as you deep dive after the survey and contextualise the results. When used to measure specific initiatives rather than culture as a whole (pulse surveys), useful data at a micro level can be obtained, as long as it’s used in context and not taken as gospel.

Use sparingly and as a benchmark if you must, but avoid relying on this method to fully inform your people strategy as it may overlook core issues and jeopardise your culture initiatives.

What should be done instead?

1. Gap Analysis

Understand the expectations and experience of the people and management through a series of purposefully constructed interviews and workshops, using a diagonal slice with varied tenure, and any standard gap analysis technique.  If facilitated well, you will identify the gaps in the intended employee experience and the lived employee experience. The power of conversation cannot be underestimated. With this information, you can then adopt a highly collaborative and consultative approach to develop initiatives that address specific gaps. This method also will be steps in the right direction to build trust. In the facilitation process, Peter Senge’s inquiry/advocacy model is useful:

Peter Senge’s Inquiry/Advocacy mental model

2. Build Trust

Everything, and I mean everything, begins with trust. There should be purposeful intent in everything HR does to build trust.

If you centre your people strategy around nothing other than creating an environment where people are given multiple avenues to discuss issues without consequence, where leadership is held to account for behaviour as much as results, where you actually listen and implement change (demonstrated action), and where you measure your culture’s transparency and openness, you will eradicate an undercurrent and stop toxicity bubbling under the surface. You will also be creating a culture of high performance. If you feel the need to survey anything - survey trust.

Of course in all of this you need to teach your leaders and managers the “how to”. As we know, once they have the skill, it is more likely be used.

If you get to a place where you can just ask, and be told, where leaders are driving trust in culture, are embracing diversity in thought and opinion, and empowered to act as skilled agents for change, you won’t need to use a survey, you will be fully informed. Stuff doesn’t get buried in cultures of high trust.

3. Measure Leadership Effectiveness Separately

Driving a high performing culture cannot be done without high performing, engaged, aligned and effective leadership. If you want to find out exactly what is going on you need to assess and measure leadership effectiveness and not via an anonymous survey, rather aligned to your leadership development program which, hopefully, centres around emotional intelligence.

We have been using Human Synergistics Tools for more than 20 years as the global leader, scientifically-backed diagnostic tools that measures emotional intelligence.

Human Synergistics Lifestyles Inventory

These insights are mine derived from years of experience, but I also recommend The Corporate Culture Survival by Edgar Schein (1999). Some of the theories advanced in this book set me off on the path of not relying on culture surveys.

If you would like to discuss your people strategy, or how to go beyond a survey approach and implement more effective methods for assessing culture, leadership, reach out for a discussion.