Following the launch of the Culture & EVP – Transformational Soul Mates Driving Organisational Change White Paper earlier this week, (please download here if you missed it), we’re creating some shorter blogs, that touch on some of the key topics that have emerged from our research.
Who knows what the next few months will bring, but we’d make the point that culture and Employee Value Proposition will perhaps be even more important in creating supportive, empathetic workforces as and when we get in front of Covid-19. Understanding what people collectively value and need to be at their best will help to create a culture that people want to stay in and are attracted to join.
Below we’ve focused on the importance of metrics to both culture and the Employee Value Proposition.
CEO and C-suite Culture and EVP buy-in and ongoing investment and sponsorship
There’s unanimous agreement that without CEO and C-suite buy-in, culture and EVP will not gain the investment or traction to become, and remain a business priority.
Making or maintaining culture and EVP as organisation priorities depends on a robust business case, backed by measurement rather than sentiment. Supporting this view is i4cp’s research finding that ‘90% of organisations that were unsuccessful in transforming their cultures, did not set clear success measures upfront.’
Questions you may want to ponder as you consider this point:
Have you clearly defined your current and desired culture?
How are you currently measuring culture and cultural change within your organisation?
What metrics do you use to measure the impact of your EVP with both internal and external audiences?
How do you go about combining these in a compelling business case?
An engagement survey gives different metrics to a culture survey
Unsurprisingly from our research, we’ve found that the people engagement survey is how the majority of companies measure their culture, but it’s important to point out that an engagement survey is different from a culture survey.
The engagement survey focuses on the feelings of individuals and their first-person experience, the latter explores the collective patterns of behaviour, in response to the ‘organisation’s operating system’. The ‘system’ includes aspects such as the unique structures, processes and communication methods which send signals to employees around how they should behave, in order to be accepted in the organisation.
Whilst there are a number of generic research surveys through which to gauge and compare engagement, this does not exist in the same way with culture. This isn’t surprising as a company culture is unique, with different values, business objectives and situational challenges.
Measuring colleagues’ collective view of what they perceive the current culture to be and what they’d like it to be if they and the organisation were to be at peak performance, is an effective way of measuring and defining your culture change programme, and also gives a benchmark measure. The Barrett Culture Values Assessment, which I’m trained in and know well and highly rate, does exactly that. It can be tailored to each company, and produces results that are not only insightful, but enable organisations to prioritise the action required to create a healthier culture, that subsequently creates higher people engagement and better performance.
Similarly, EVP impact can be measured in a number of ways. But they have to be ways that are relevant to your organisation, its talent audiences and its direction. Such metrics might touch on pipeline leakage, offer acceptance ratios, propensity to consider you an employer of choice and retention over the first three months. However, they will not be relevant to every organisation. We increasingly have the means to take such readings regularly, but too many EVPs are based on what is now historical data and insights. They look backwards, rather than inspiring future talent.
Our key metrics takeaways:
A strategic and robust business case underpinned by clearly defined success metrics, will help secure senior leader buy-in and ongoing sponsorship;
Think twice about using an engagement survey to measure culture;
Bespoke the metrics you use to measure EVP and culture change impact;
Ensure that cultural metrics are applied to EVP development and vice versa;
That the way we measure the hearts and minds of our people and candidates could be a lot more nimble and a lot more regular.
EVP and culture have the capacity to be transformational soulmates that drive effective organisational change.
The question to ask yourselves – are the numbers you are producing able to tell such a story?
Food for thought and if you’d like to talk more about our findings, do get in touch…