Measuring company culture through employee culture surveys

Culture, you know it when you see it

Breakfast burritos, impromptu talent shows, and Irish video chats while you fill up your 10 a.m. Coke are just a few of the things you might run into on a given Thursday at Qualtrics headquarters. Throw in a high volume of red Qualtrics t-shirts around the office and it becomes clear there is something special going on. Something we all understand, yet don’t comprehend at the same time.

We have a culture.

It’s an essential element to keeping us motivated and on track for where we are headed as a company.  We make it and it makes us.

Your organization has a corporate culture as well, whether you know it or not. Right now, it’s shaping every interaction you have with one another. It’s either inspiring you to creatively solve problems, or encouraging you to scroll through job postings on Glassdoor.com. It’s either instilling you with confidence to take on a new project, or pushing you out the door the minute the clock hits 5 p.m. Culture, in other words, helps people engage in just about anything they do, including work.

Surveying over 10,000 HR and industry leaders, Deloitte’s latest “Global Human Capital Trends 2017” report states that "Organizational culture, engagement, and employee brand proposition remain top priorities in 2017; employee experience ranks as a major trend again this year." which was echoed by almost 80% of executives who claimed that the employee experience was very important yet only 22% of the same group said that their companies had excelled at building an exceptional employee experience.  So if you’re wondering what your culture is and if it’s keeping your employees engaged, you are not alone.

Employee engagement, you know it when you measure it

According to Deloitte, "people analytics" or the measurement and analysis of hr related data is a rising trend in around the world. measuring your culture is just one data series that you can measure, other examples include new hire surveys, 360 performance reviews and employee pulse surveys. Stitching all of these data points together can give you a holistic picture and of course, Qualtrics can help you manage employee experience program.

People analytics can be a large project to take on, but starting by measuring just one or two areas of your company such as company culture and employee engagement is a good place to start. By measuring these two things in tandem you can see how employee engagement drives (or derails) your company culture. Many times the goal is not to define what your culture is, or what you want it to be but rather if your culture is helping or hurting your company.

And how do you measure that? Well, measuring the impact of culture on employee engagement is a pretty good place to start.

Step up your engagement

Measuring employee engagement hasn’t always been easy. Engagement is more than just job satisfaction. Engagement, amongst other things, is passion, dedication, and fulfillment from the work one does.

Lengthy survey processes, untimely data, and complex organizational reporting requirements have made the experience costly and the data irrelevant—which helps explain why leaders feel under-prepared to tackle the challenge.

Measuring employee engagement to understand cultural impact can be an uphill battle. Here are a few items to demonstrate how Qualtrics Employee Engagement can help you streamline any effort to quickly and accurately measure engagement:

1. Real-time Results

To address team morale and passion, you need to act fast. That means you can’t wait months—or even weeks—to get the results from your employee engagement surveys. Whether you’re running thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of responses through our platform, Qualtrics Employee Engagement processes results in real-time, as they come in.

2. Individualized, Custom Dashboards

Each manager has their own dashboard tailored to their part of the organization. With a simple click, these personalized, interactive dashboards slice and dice the data however the manager needs.

3. Sophisticated Hierarchical Reporting

Knowing who is engaged and, more importantly, who isn't, is critical. Hierarchical reporting lets managers drill down into the data and compare divisions, regions, and teams. With the ability to see pockets of high or low engagement, managers can now easily figure out what levers to pull to increase employee engagement and productivity.

4.  Operational Flexibility

Different organizations want to ask their employees different things in different ways. Qualtrics Employee Engagement lets you choose from over 70 different question types and translate into 50+ languages. You can require responses, randomize questions, introduce sophisticated display logic, establish anonymity thresholds, and much more.

5. Super Easy Form Creation

Creating survey forms needs to be simple and intuitive. With Qualtrics’ point-and-click platform, managers can now set up form flow, import employee data, and set up questions and categories with ease —no coding required!

So whether it’s wearing company t-shirts around office or setting up webcam water coolers, the subtleties of what and why you do things are a tricky place to start measuring. Instead, start by measuring the impact those cultural pieces have on employee engagement – and let technology help!