You may think you have a pretty good idea of what your organization’s culture is, but in reality, you could have no clue what it feels like to be a mid-level employee of your firm. Often, there is a gap between the culture that leaders think they have created (or want to create) and the culture that actually exists in their workplace. Simply stating, for example, that an organization’s culture is all about encouragement, teamwork, and accountability doesn’t make it true. If these concepts are not the lived experiences of your mid and lower-level employees on a daily basis, they’re truly only buzzwords.
The corporate culture assessment is a tool to help executives identify if and where this gap exists, and more importantly, how to begin closing it.
Why is Corporate Culture Important?
Many companies report that corporate culture is crucial in three key areas: a business’ identity, retention rates, and its public image. It’s true; word of your organization’s culture, good or bad, will spread fast. It will affect who you are able to hire and determine who you are able to keep. Think of your company’s culture much the same as you would the reputation of an individual. Those individuals who are known for their work ethic are hired, promoted, and paid well. On the other hand, individuals who develop a reputation for skirting the truth and cutting corners will soon find themselves facing questions about their integrity and competency.
The same rings true for your company. Every leader understands that if you develop a reputation for treating clients well and producing great work, you’ll experience repeat business and referrals. Similarly, if you treat your employees well, invest in their potential, and maintain an honest, merit-based, and performance-driven work environment, you will retain and recruit the best talent in your industry. Corporate culture is truly one of the most important drivers of overall operational success.
What is a Corporate Culture Assessment?
As mentioned above, a corporate culture assessment is a tool that helps executives identify the gap between what they’d like their corporate culture to be, and what it actually is. Corporate culture assessments help you measure the strength and overall health of your culture. This identification process is the stepping stone for your company to begin designing its next steps for leveraging strengths and filling in the areas in which it can improve.
What Can I Learn from a Corporate Culture Assessment?
With a corporate culture assessment, you’ll gather insights far greater than you ever could with an employee engagement survey. A corporate culture assessment is an objective analysis of how things are working at both the employee-to-employee and employee-to-employer levels of your business.
A corporate culture assessment provides much more than a few buzzwords that try to tell you who you are. Far from a horoscope, a corporate culture assessment should be comprehensive and representative of the experiences and aptitudes of employees at different levels of your company.
The John Mattone Global 5CCA system shows you how your corporate culture feeds into (or is hampering) your operating success through several measures. Starting at the bottom of the proverbial culture pyramid, there are three building blocks: your company’s capability culture, or it’s “can do” attitude; its commitment culture, or its “will do” attitude, and its alignment culture, or its “must do” attitude. These building blocks create both the individual performance culture and the team performance culture within your company, which in turn contribute to your overall culture. The 5CCA system generates a powerful 52-page report detailing the analysis of each of these subcultures.
Is Our Organization Ready for a Corporate Culture Overhaul?
Not all organizations are ready for cultural change. Some have serious flaws that need to be addressed, and leadership needs to be shifted or reenergized before true and lasting transformation can take place. If an organization embarks on a cultural overhaul before they’re ready for it, they will spend money and time attempting to implement changes that simply won’t stick. The Cultural Transformation Readiness Assessment-40 (CTRA-40) is designed to help you determine whether your business is ready for a culture transformation based on 6 cultural change readiness predictors.
Corporate culture is crucial to driving operational success. IL Movement’s Culture Assessment and Cultural Transformation Readiness Assessment are tried and true tools to help your organization examine its culture, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and start implementing lasting, transformative changes.