Date: Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Time: 1:00 pm Eastern / 10:00 am Pacific
Presenters:
Charles Rogel, Chief Consulting Officer
Organization culture is something we build, the employee experience is what we measure, and employee engagement is our reward. Creating an intentional culture requires measuring perceptions of the current culture and how it aligns with the desired culture.
Transcript
Charles Rogel | 00:00
Hi everyone. Welcome to our presentation today. My name’s Charles Rogel. I’m the Chief Consulting Officer here at Decision Wise. For those of you that don’t know much about us, decision wise is a management consulting firm. We do a lot of employee surveys and 360 degree feedback assessments. So we’re very data oriented in terms of using employee feedback to improve organization performance and leadership competence. Today I’m gonna talk about measuring and creating an intentional culture and how we use data to really give us some good insights, um, in terms of how to do that. Um, I also wanted to mention before we begin, this presentation does count for HRCI and SHM credit hours towards recertification. So one hour of credit, and we’ll be sending out an email after our presentation today with, um, the codes that you’ll need to redeem those credits in the future. So lemme jump into kind of our agenda and what we want to talk about as we go through our presentation.
Charles Rogel | 00:54
Um, I wanna kind of set up where we’re at in terms of what we’re hearing and measuring around culture. Then we’ll get into kind of these culture components, or at least how we here at decision wise, think about culture and how it impacts the employee experience. And then I’m gonna nerd out with you a bit and go through the kind of five different ways to measure culture that give you some really cool insights to then use and leverage in terms of your different initiatives to drive culture and meaning in your organization. And then finally, I’ll, I’ll briefly spend some time in terms of talking about what to do, um, how to use this data and how to, um, make a a difference, uh, in your organization as we go through. I do wanna encourage you as we go through this to use the chat function and the question and answer function.
Charles Rogel | 01:40
We’ll try to, uh, I’ll try to reply to your, your comments as we go, but I’d also love to hear your experience, stuff you’re doing to measure or improve culture in your organization. The more we can kind of share best practices together, uh, the better. Um, alright, so let me jump in as we get through this. Um, I wanna kinda revisit the slide that I’ve presented a couple times as we’ve done different webinars in terms of what we’re seeing around trends, especially as we entered and emerge from the pandemic, because that did have a big impact on, um, what we’re measuring or at least hearing from our clients in terms of interest in measuring topics around culture and DEI in this case. So when the pandemic hit back in 2020, um, we started kind of keeping track of what were the main, um, concerns that our clients were feeling that they wanted to measure around.
Charles Rogel | 02:32
Like they wanted to kind of customize, maybe change their annual employee survey. And so some of the topics that became more important was obviously safety in terms of how we’re protecting people around the pandemic. Diversity, equity, and inclusion became, uh, a really, uh, big topic, especially with the murder of George Floyd and the civil unrest that we saw thereafter. And so some of our clients were measuring some of the, or using some statements to measure diversity, equity, and inclusion on their employee surveys. Um, but in 2020, just about all of our clients too, in fact, it’s part of the standard questions that we use. Um, we have, you know, three or four questions around that topic that we’ve continued to use thereafter. Um, communication, productivity, collaboration, we’re all worried about those things as we were working from home. Um, and surprisingly, or the good news was in 2020, these perceptions or topics actually scored pretty well.
Charles Rogel | 03:22
Then as we merged, or at least, um, transitioned to 2021, working from home became the top topic. As you all remember, workload increased for many people because there were layoffs in 2020. So we were short staffed. We’re trying to hire, we’re trying to retain people. People were kind of jumping around jobs as they were realizing a a lot of the benefits from working from home, DEI was still on the list. It bumped down a little bit, um, compared to these other topics. And then culture kind of emerged too, because people were concerned, well, what happened to our culture? A lot of people are working from home still. We’re trying to get people back in the office in some cases. Um, but where’s what’s going on with our culture? So we’re measuring and really tuning in on some of these topics as we’re going. The good news, again, these statements around culture that we were measuring were doing pretty well, and we saw higher, you know, agreement with those questions.
Charles Rogel | 04:12
Um, in 2022, we, you know, flexibility and work-life balance were the top themes. You know, the, the hybrid work environment, getting people, some people back to the office, people trying to hold onto their ability to work from home. Um, that caused a lot of, uh, disruption. So people were kind of upset about that as we, uh, transitioned back to the office in some cases. Some people are still fully remote, but we saw a lot of transition there. Retention was still a, a big topic. DEI and culture kind of merged together a bit too. So this is where we were kind of combining these two statements, or at least these, these uh, ideas and kind of factoring them, uh, together as we looked at the results. And then, um, slight interest there at the bottom around mental health. But that kind of, um, uh, was merged into wellbeing in a way in terms of topics we’re measuring.
Charles Rogel | 05:02
And then last year, um, there was this emphasis where employees were, were more about instead of work-life balance, the shift was kind of life work balance. So employees were feeling like, Hey, my, my personal life is important. They realized that hey, there was a lot of benefits from working from home and flexibility we had. And so that was an emphasis. Compensation was really big, still is. And then what we saw is we kind of changed the acronym from DEI to DEIB to bring in belonging to that. And we’re kind of merging again that with culture. Um, and workload was still there this year. It’s going to kind of culture being the, the, um, uh, the emphasis with DEIB kind of secondary or combined with it. And so what we saw is essentially a pendulum swing where there is a larger emphasis on DEI at the beginning.
Charles Rogel | 05:53
Now it’s swinging more to being more holistic around culture because there has been some backlash around DEI initiatives because we kind of went all in, or there’s a lot of emphasis there and there’s some resistance in some organizations and by some people. And so now it’s kind of being folded into this whole idea of culture. Creating an inclusive culture is essentially the, um, the, the phase that we’re in right now as we’re thinking about some of these statements. So I’m gonna go through and kind of talk about ways to measure and kind of get, um, some understanding around these different areas. Yeah, and sorry, I keep using DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, uh, are the statements. Some people use EDI, other people have, uh, just, um, you know, inclusion. And so these, um, this acronym’s been changing and morphing a bit with different organizations. Alright, so let me jump in.
Charles Rogel | 06:44
Here’s how we think about culture. Everyone’s got a culture and, um, you, you have it whether you’re intentional about it or not, and your employees can describe it even without you prompting it. And so when you ask them what’s the culture like around here, they will have opinions. They’ll say, well, we’re very, you know, performance, uh, you know, related or, you know, the importance is on numbers and metrics and achieving results. Or, you know, we’re very much a family around here. We get along, help each other out. We’re very collaborative and things like that. So people can describe your culture, whether or not you have a definition of what your culture is. Now what we’re trying to do is to say, well, let’s be intentional about this and make sure that, um, we build intentionally what we want because our culture informs how people essentially make decisions.
Charles Rogel | 07:33
And so when they’re confronted with a, with a decision or a a customer, for example, they know how to respond based on what the culture informs them about how decisions are made. And so this is really important in terms of how you define this. Your culture then creates, um, is, uh, creates the employee experience. So kind of the sum of your perceptions that your employees have. And this is what we measure. So when we do employee surveys, we’re measuring people’s overall experience. Is it good? Is it bad? What’s working? What’s not working? And so this is the impact that your culture has on employees. And finally, if you have a good culture and it drives a good experience, you get good engagement. And this is where people are more passionate and committed about the work that they’re doing. And, um, and that’s your re reward.
Charles Rogel | 08:15
And so, you know, you measure that on employee engagement survey and you kind of see how engaged our employees, how much they’re thriving in the organization. So, um, kind of a cascading approach, but again, at the core of this is how your culture really influences all the different other components. Now, if I was to put this into a hierarchy of, um, kind of the elements of culture, how it cascades in the organization, we’ve got our mission and vision at the top. We’ll talk more about that. Our mission and vision is kind of why we’re in business. Our strategy is how we accomplish the mission and vision and our values are kind of the behaviors or norms that we establish that help us to a achieve those things. You can go another level down and say, well, leadership competencies also, if we’ve established those, you know, kind of a competency model for our, our leaders that helps reinforce maybe the five values that we’ve chosen to, uh, reinforce our mission and strategy.
Charles Rogel | 09:10
And then that cascades into the goals, the team dynamics, our procedures and incentives. So, so all of these things kind of cascade down as we think about how we’re built as an organization. One thing I always say is like, keep in mind, like our organizations are all a myth. We are held together by a set of beliefs and norms and kind of operating, um, instructions that have been created out of nothing, right? So what we say is our mission and vision and strategy, hopefully that has some mi some purpose to it for people and some excitement around it. But again, we are trying to create, um, some, uh, structure around this myth so people have an idea or at least, um, something worthwhile to kind of believe in and, uh, motivate them. And so I’ll kind of revisit that a bit here more. But as we talk about these things, we then get into, okay, well, let’s define our culture.
Charles Rogel | 10:03
So first we get into the mission statement, and again, it’s your reason for existence. Most of us have a mission statement. Most of us couldn’t repeat it because we don’t know what it is, or we’ve seen it a few times, or we, we kind of know what it says, but we couldn’t do it word for word. Um, your mission statement is important because it’s all about your organization purpose and why you exist. And so people will feel more meaning and purpose around their job if they understand why we’re in business and the outcomes that it creates. We always find when we do employee engagement surveys that you’re, that the sense of meaning and purpose that people have in their job is a strong driver of employee engagement. Normally, it is inherent in organizations like in healthcare, nonprofit organizations, um, but I have seen it surprisingly high in manufacturing.
Charles Rogel | 10:51
Um, and in other, uh, organizations where they feel like they’re actually making a difference, their job matters. Um, they’re interacting with customers or, or people like that. And, you know, um, having good experiences like credit union, for example, I also see that happen as they interact with their members. Um, next are comes your value statements. And if you think about your value statements, these are the core principles that guide the organization and the culture. So how do we achieve our mission statement? Well, it’s through these values. So, um, it’s the moral compass. It helps with decision making. You can kind of see this description we have here, and if they’re, if they’re relevant and people believe in them, then yeah, they are going to rally around these things, especially if they see them practice by leadership. And that’s what we’re trying to measure a lot of times on our employee surveys.
Charles Rogel | 11:38
So are they unique? Um, do they really guide the operations of our company or are they just, uh, nice words that we have posted around here that we really don’t, um, emphasize or model? So that’s really important. People need to see that we’re actually living up to our values, that there’s examples of, there’s stories of how that happens. Um, and that helps people to kind of rally and understand, or at least, um, buy into and, and feel more motivated about their work. All right, most of, you’re probably familiar with this stuff and have gone through it. I’ve got some samples here. So, as you think about some of the larger organizations, I, I did a search on the internet. Some of these might have changed since, but you can see, you know, red Cross alleviate human suffering in the face of emergencies. Pixar is pretty simple.
Charles Rogel | 12:23
Make great films with great people. Nike feels that everyone’s an athlete and that, uh, we want bring you inspiration, uh, to the world. So if you have a body or an athlete, that’s, that’s a fun one. And then, um, Walmart’s pretty simple. We save people money so they can live better. So again, this is what we hope our employees remember or understand about why we’re in business as an organization to achieve this. I just got a list of common values that I see over here. Most organizations choose like five. If you choose more than five, then it’s hard to remember that list. Four or five is usually a good, um, list of values. You can have descriptions of your values too. If you get too complicated with all this stuff though, people just, they tune out. It’s like, well, that’s too much to remember, or What do you really mean by that?
Charles Rogel | 13:08
So it’s a little bit harder to get traction if you make it too, uh, too complicated. So keep it simple, keep it very conversational, and, uh, just make it real relevant and real to people’s experience. Once you have those in place, then we say, okay, let’s start measuring some stuff. So the first level, and I, and I kind of call this the level one, this is the basic stuff that we typically do. We’re trying to, on employee surveys generally measure how aligned people are with the organization’s mission and values. And so there’s several statements here. I’ve just chose 10 common questions that we’re typically using on our employee surveys to measure some of these things. And I’ll show you some data behind some of these things too. But are people comfortable in the culture? Do they feel like they belong here? You know, number four, uh, you know, are the mission and goals of the organization or the mission and values, whatever you wanna say here, important to me personally.
Charles Rogel | 14:00
Like, am I aligned with those? Do I see people living our values, especially senior leaders? And then, um, you know, you can also ask, do we live up to the bat our value of accountability and different things like that? No. And you can see these are all statements that are designed to be measured on a five point agreement scale. We’re trying to get people to say, agree or strongly agree to these items, to, um, understand, you know, these topics. So again, it’s more of a alignment. If you’ve done, if you’ve rolled them out, let’s say you rolled ’em out this year, you’ve done a lot of communication, now we get some data back to see how people are responding to those things. Um, here’s some data. So as we’ve been measuring this over the past few years, this belonging statement’s been pretty stable. You know, in 2020, in our global database, about 400 organizations here, um, 79% of the responses to this question, I feel like I belong here.
Charles Rogel | 14:52
Were agree or strongly agree that went down to 78, bounces back up to 80% in 2023. Feeling comfortable in the culture, normally a higher scoring question. Most people saying agree or strongly agree, so 83% last year, people saying agree or strongly agree to that statement. And then I can be myself at work. We started using this more in 2021. You can see we didn’t have benchmark data in 2020, and that one actually scores pretty high. But generally what we find statements, when you’re asking about the individual as opposed to the organization, um, they tend to score that one a little bit higher, uh, overall. So 83% agreement on that statement, which is good. So generally people feel pretty good in, in most organizations, cultures.
Charles Rogel | 15:37
All right. And then as we get into the second stage, so now we’re leveling up, we’re saying, well, let’s then measure how people feel about our values. And so what do I mean by that? Well, we take your five values and we put them at the end of the employee survey and we ask two questions. We say, number one, rank order, these five values in terms of how you feel they are emphasized in the organization. So if these are your values, and people are looking at these and saying, well, we, we, we talk a lot about these things, but really the number one thing I see around here is accountability. We’re all about accountability, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you say, okay, well now rank order these items in terms of how important they are to you. And so what you can do then is you can get some data back.
Charles Rogel | 16:21
And so if you say, well, which ones are ranked highest in terms of how they’re emphasized, we’re seeing performance shows up at the top of the list. So most people are saying, well, 15, you know, second choice, you know, mentions on this one, ten third choices and whatnot. So you can see that people as they’re looking at the values, respect got mentioned, the least teamwork is here, it got mentioned the third choice a lot of times. But really, performance stands out with accountability, um, uh, coming up a lot in terms of their people’s first choice in terms of what they’re seeing. Contrast that with how important it is to the individual. So now if we’re asking people, what do you wanna see emphasized more around this organization, and I’m just doing this as an example, but I’ve seen this a few times with other organizations. They’re saying, Hey, it’s teamwork.
Charles Rogel | 17:07
We want it to be more team-based and collaborative in, in other words, in our organization, compared to all this emphasis on performance, it’s still important, but hey man, it just seems like we’re all about hitting the numbers or revenue at all costs or things like that. So you get a feel for what’s emphasized, um, and, and what really rules our culture as opposed to what people are desiring a little bit more. So this is a nice two questions to add at the end of your survey with some values here. You can also include, some clients will include, for example, a dis a short description of each of their values so people understand what we’re talking about and they can make some good choices. Um, again, this helps you de decide, okay, is it more like if we ask leadership, you know, and then we can do some demographic comparisons.
Charles Rogel | 17:54
This is where I start to nerd out a bit. I’ll say, what did leaders say about these things compared to employees? What did males say about this data compared to females? And so then you get some good perspectives in terms of these different demographic comparisons about how people rank order these different values and topics that really drive, um, you know, that really help accomplish the strategy of the organization. Alright, now, if you’ve done this and you’re ready to level up one more, then we get into the cultural archetypes types of assessments. So here, um, we use the competing values framework. This has been around for over 40 years. Quinn and Berg are the two consultants. There’s always two consultants or two psychologists that come up with these models. Um, but they came up with these two, uh, kind of competing dimensions where, um, either you’re more of an internal oriented organization or an external oriented or organization.
Charles Rogel | 18:47
You’re more flexible or you’re more focused. And what this creates are kind of these archetypes, uh, which I’ll show you here, where either you’re more collaborative, so you’re more internal and flexible. So you’re collaborative. If you’re internal and focused, you’re gonna be more conservative. Um, creative over here. And then competitive. None of these are good or bad, right or wrong. They’re just all kind of typical cultural archetypes that function in most organizations. You can see I’ve got some cons here as well that describe. So if you’re in this collaborative space, now I use, I renamed these, um, I think use, um, Quinn would say competitive is no, conservative is control. Competitive is more performance oriented. I can’t remember the exact names, but I, I wanted to come up with a nice, uh, organized or, you know, some c words here to make it easy to remember.
Charles Rogel | 19:37
Um, you’ll notice that, you know, if you’re collaborative, it’s about relationships. I always call this kind of the people quadrant. The problem is if you’re too collaborative, you can be slow to make decisions. Too many cooks in the kitchen kind of thing. Groupthink sets in. And so again, it kind of bogs down a bit ’cause everyone’s gotta be consulted or, um, you know, in alignment with decision think and things and, and how they work. We also might be wary about, um, making tough decisions because we don’t wanna hurt people’s feelings or, uh, or mess up people’s relationships. On the right hand side, this creative culture, innovating, empowering, nimble, we’re pushing decisions down in the organization. However, it can also be, you know, we’re chasing too many, chasing too many shiny objects, right? There’s always a lot of change. Uh, we’re lack lacking focus. We’re we’re pivoting too frequently.
Charles Rogel | 20:29
A lot of unfinished pro projects. And so there’s good and bad, again, to these conservative, um, you know, collaborative. Let’s see. Uh, creative. I’d say more, you know, think of your marketing agencies. Think of, um, other organizations that are kind of putting out new, you know, tech organizations a lot of times are more creative. For example, conservative organizations tend to be more kind of government organizations, maybe older organizations that have been around for a while because there it’s like, hey, this is the way we’ve always done things, but they value stability processes being a little bit more cautious or risk averse, maybe financial institutions fall into this category. The cons here is that it’s more bureaucratic, right? Top down kind of leadership and decision makings. There’s politics ’cause there’s a lot of tenure a lot of times in these organizations. And so, you know, you gotta be respectful of people’s positions and we can be slow to change.
Charles Rogel | 21:21
And then finally, the competitive one is more results oriented. These might be your sales organizations, people that are really focused on market share performance, stuff like that. Results oriented tend to celebrate their wins. Very, um, focused on execution, getting things done. And so this is, um, this is the, uh, you know, the, the cons here, I guess I’d say are sometimes we get into this blame game. So we’re afraid to make mistakes. ’cause the last time someone put their neck out, you know, they got in trouble and they, um, you know, and it gets shared and we’re very critical of one another. You know, when we don’t meet our numbers, maybe we’re too concerned with our numbers and we’re not flexible enough to really change and pivot when we need to. So, um, you create some yes people, because again, you might be, it might be driven by one strong leader in the organization, and it can be stressful as well.
Charles Rogel | 22:13
You show these to people and a lot of times, um, you’ll look at this and nod and you’ll see the cons and say, oh yeah, that’s us over here. Most organizations, they fit into one of these quadrants and they’re striving for one or another of these quadrants. And the hard part is that sometimes if you’re internal on this side, it’s hard to kind of be conservative and creative so you can kind of move to collaborative a little bit more easier than you can to the creative and vice versa as you’re looking at some of these topics. So this again, is a, a nice model for understanding kind of who we are, what we’re striving for is this cultural archetype working for us in terms of meeting our strategy. I work with lot more organizations and they’re trying to drive innovation. They’re trying to say we need to kind of be more nimble and flexible because of the market changes and the uncertainty that we see.
Charles Rogel | 23:05
Um, you know, the, the, um, the, uh, pandemic update, uh, or upended everything. And so we need to rethink our culture and how we do things around here. So it is a journey and it’s a multi-year journey to move from one quadrant to another. Um, but using these measurements helps you to understand how we’re making progress and where we’re, we’re getting traction. Now, we can do some cool assessments here too, because, uh, we can ask the question like this. Two questions again at the end of your survey. And, and this is really insightful because we can look at this and say, okay, same deal as we did with the values. What would you, how would you best describe the environment of our organization? Choose one. You can do a rank order too. I like the choosing one in this case. It forces them to kind of make a decision.
Charles Rogel | 23:50
And then which one would you, which should we emphasize more? What would you like to see more in your, um, in your group? Um, and then generally we can see results like this. So if we say what best describes our organization, it’s interesting because, you know, 38% of people in this example said, collaborative, you know, we’re collaborative. Another 32% said we’re conservative. So collaborative, kind of conservative mix playing out here. Some people said competitive, we had some don’t knows over here on the right hand side, very few said creative. And then, what should we emphasize more? Well, people kind of said, well, I wanna keep the collaborative piece that’s important. So a lot of people said collaborative number one, but number two came in creative. So, so this is telling us that this conservative culture, people aren’t, aren’t liking as much. They’re kind of craving more collaboration, more creativity and, and kind of squishing out some of these other areas.
Charles Rogel | 24:42
Now, the insightful thing you can do here is you can break this out by department. ’cause when you look at department, it’s all over the place. Like some places when I’ve looked at this by department, um, it’ll be big on the creative side and lower on the collaborative and and whatnot. So you’re gonna see differences by department, and they might even say, within this department, I would like to see this type of culture. And I think that’s fitting because even like within a, a finance to HR to operations, whatever, you will see different flavors of culture appear depending upon the leadership, uh, your job function, stuff like that. It plays into these, um, these perceptions. So this is helpful again, if you’re trying to migrate from being one of these, you know, maybe more conservative cultures to a more collaborative or competitive, uh, type atmosphere.
Charles Rogel | 25:31
Um, and again, you can look at this by, um, by, uh, all kinds of, uh, demographics. Male female leaders, non-leader. One interesting thing I saw with one client, we looked at the level of engagement. So if you were fully engaged in your job, what they were saying about what they saw in the culture was that it was very collaborative. If you were disengaged in your job, what they saw is that it was very conservative. And so they felt like, Hey, this conservative culture isn’t helping me thrive. And then what did they desire? Well, the, the people that were fully engaged, they, they already saw it as very collaborative for them. They desired more creativity. So they emphasized creative more. And if you were fully disengaged and you asked what culture did you desire? They desired collaborative culture. So it was interesting. It’s almost like this hierarchy of needs first.
Charles Rogel | 26:22
If I’m gonna engage, I want at least a collaborative environment. And then if I want, if I’m fully engaged, I’m desiring more creativity in my environment, um, to thrive. So we, so you can do a lot of fun stuff with this data based on your demographics that give you some good insight in terms of, um, you know, what’s driving, you know, success. All right, we’re gonna level up again. Now we, we get into the cultural de derailers. Now, most of these were already measuring in organizations. And so I should say this, this is more of a basic, um, assessment because we are getting at a lot of these topics in the 50 or so questions that we might measure on employee engagement survey. Some of the derailers that we see, these are detractors of, um, good cultural, uh, practices within an organization. And I’ve got too many to kind of talk to.
Charles Rogel | 27:08
I’ll just point out a few bureaucracy stands out. Um, lack of employee voice when people feel like they don’t, aren’t being heard or we’re not being responsive to feedback, um, that creates a lot of bad things in the organization. People just feel, um, like, you know, their opinion doesn’t matter. Silos, this is kind of this collaboration stuff. Do we work well across departments and functions? Um, that can take a hit stress or excessive workload. It’s hard to kind of feel too jazzed about your culture when you’re working so hard, you’re feeling like you’re pulling a lot of weight. Um, and then like micromanagement here stands out too in terms of not having autonomy or feeling empowered in your work. Um, so those, these are typical topics that we’re seeing show up, a couple others that come up. Lack of trust or transparency. And so when they feel like the organization doesn’t trust ’em to do their jobs, or the organization’s not being transparent in their communication, your culture takes a hit.
Charles Rogel | 28:03
Trust took a hit when, um, a lot of organizations were kind of either, well, employees felt if we were prematurely trying to get back to the office after the pandemic, or we were taking away the remote work flexibility, Hey, you don’t trust me to work from home anymore, do you? Why are we changing this? I’m doing, I’m thriving. Working from home performance is up. And so that was a lack of trust that emerged in a lot of the comments that we saw. The other thing is unfairness or favoritism. If people sense that leaders treat different people differently, or if different departments get away with stuff that other departments can’t or don’t do, or if leaders don’t walk the talk, um, that sense of unfairness, um, is a real cultural derailer. People just, you know, they, they get very frustrated by that. And so that’s one of those other topics that comes out.
Charles Rogel | 28:53
Um, I also mentioned question 15. Whenever we see organizations go through a lot of change, if there’s been a major disruption, perceptions overall in their employee survey go down. And so these are things that we’re looking out for to kind of say, Hey, what are some of the derailers in your organization that might be taking a hit? Some of these touch on these derails are also kind of a subset of the questions that I mentioned before. But here’s our benchmark data. So as we’re looking at this, this is what we typically see. This is based on four years of data from 29 20 19 to 2022, the percent of agree and strongly agree responses in our database with about 400 organizations. Now, you can see when we ask questions about the supervisor, generally we’re seeing higher perceptions. 86% of people agree with this statement about being treated with fairness and respect from their supervisor.
Charles Rogel | 29:41
That’s great. We wanna maintain that. They also feel pretty good about getting, being empowered by their supervisor. And you’ll notice this vision and goals one, most people pretty aligned with the vision and goals of the organization. So that’s good. Here’s this one about trusting the people to do their jobs. Here’s an interesting one. People here live, our company values 75%. When I just look around to the general employee population, we ask that same question. Senior leaders live the company values 69% favorable. So senior leaders kind of get beat up a bit on questions. Normally people have less interaction with senior leaders, and so sometimes they, um, they will score these less or at least agree with them less. But also what happens is senior leaders are making decisions and some of those decisions tick people off. And so we’re seeing that, hey, that doesn’t align with our values, that decision they made.
Charles Rogel | 30:30
And so then they get, uh, you know, this question takes a hit down here, working effectively across departments and functions. That was that question around the siloing that we see in organizations. That’s definitely a frustration with a lot of people. Here’s another question around fairness, especially when it comes to measuring my performance in terms of performance reviews. So that’s a common topic that really appears for people, um, in terms of how their performance performances evaluated, because that’s a, it, it’s always hard. Like no one’s really figured that out and been able to do a, a stellar job there. So that’s a, a common topic. Um, what else did I want to touch on here? Um, oh, I know the voice topic. So feeling I can share my ideas. Um, there’s usually other, another question here on valuing feedback here is the organization values feedback. This employee voice topic, that’s another cultural derailer that, um, typically impacts organizations.
Charles Rogel | 31:25
All right, so there’s, there’s tons of ways to measure these. I, me, I think I mentioned 16 other topics that we could get into, but these are the ones that are the typical suspects as we’re looking at these derailers. Okay, now I’m gonna level up for the fifth and last time here. This is where we get into the framework again, and we say, well, what about the values? And then the leadership competencies. If you really want your leaders to, uh, model the values that you, uh, put out. And if you want those values to be kind of ingrained in the organization, it comes through the behaviors of your leaders. ’cause they’re gonna look directly at them and say, Hey, this guy or this woman is not value or modeling that behavior of respect, or whatever it is. And, and if they’re not doing it, then the values really don’t matter.
Charles Rogel | 32:11
So they, they won’t get in line or at least believe in those unless they’re seeing examples of that in the organization. The easiest or best way to really get people to align with this is through 360 assessments. And I know many of you probably have done these in the past and use these, some organizations, or I should say very few organizations use 360 assessments religiously. I wanna say, in other words, every leader does one once every year. Um, which is kind of best practice because it really emphasizes the behaviors and competencies that drive leadership success. So all of a sudden, leaders have, um, uh, a bar to live up to. They have kind of some expectations around their behaviors that are important to organization success. We say on the outcomes here, um, you know, you normally, it’s a development activity, right? We’re not trying to say, Hey, you need to increase your score by five points or else you’ll be, you know, in performance management.
Charles Rogel | 33:03
But it’s more about reinforcing your organization culture and values, that we have certain expectations for leaders. These are them. And we want you to live up to those topics. Um, let’s see. We do a lot of stuff here. Normally we say you wanna level your 360 assessments based on the type of leader and how strategic their role is, because the questions and statements change a bit for each area. There’s several, you can choose from lots of behaviors. We have a whole library and competency, um, we call our competency library, um, where you can choose and measure a lot of things or come up with your own. Um, and so that really helps you to align to your values. A lot of kind of times a client will come to us and say, well, here’s our value statements. Can you create leadership competencies that tie into those?
Charles Rogel | 33:47
And we’ll use either our library or, or other, um, things to do that. But what you get, again, as you can see how a leader measures up on a lot of these different statements, um, and this really tells you are they really focused on our value of accountability, for example, or innovation. Uh, what about empowerment in developing others? So the autonomy piece, uh, we’re not seeing as much outta some leaders. And so this helps us to kind of calibrate a bit and get people aligned with the values that drive success in the organization. This list is rather long. I think we have about 13 different competencies here. You can also see how you get rated by the different people that give you feedback. Um, so this is, again, kind of fifth level assessment if you’re really trying to get, um, alignment with those values, because this is usually the missing piece where leaders, if they’re not following and aligned with your values, you’re not gonna get much traction on employees doing the same.
Charles Rogel | 34:44
Um, and so again, if you’re trying to change your culture from being more, you know, too conservative to being more collaborative, these are how you’re gonna get your leaders to do that because they’re gonna be driving collaboration, for example, uh, in their, in their work groups. All right? Um, what to do. So I zipped through that pretty quick, and so now I’m at the end and I’m welcoming other, um, other, uh, suggestions here because this is essentially our last slide. As we talk about these topics, the, the organizations that I see that are very successful at that, they do a great job of continually communicating their organization mission and values. In fact, on the employee surveys that we measure, you know, that question, um, I understand our mission and values, or I feel, or these mission and values are important to me personally. They’ll actually have a name for their mission and values.
Charles Rogel | 35:34
They’ll say our, you know, our future, uh, whatever, you know, whatever their, their, their comp, their value model is. They’ll give it a name. They’ll say, our future value statements, um, you know, are making a difference around here, or I understand what they are, whatever. So there’s a lot of communication, constant communication. There’s activities, there’s, uh, themed events around the different values. And a lot of times people think, well, that’s just the fluffy stuff. I mean, that’s fine, it makes a difference. We see it on the surveys. People, um, people like that stuff. They, they, it creates meaning and purpose. And so, um, that communication really makes a difference for your people. Can’t emphasize that enough. The other ones here are the things that we’ve just went through. So number two, you gotta measure this stuff. So how are we doing? Like, are we aligning?
Charles Rogel | 36:20
Are we creating a purposeful or intentional culture here? So this is, um, this is really important for people to understand. Where are there gaps and what do people perceive that we’re doing compared to what they want us to do? Like how would we rank order these values? We came up with five values. Not all of them get emphasized equally. It it, it does vary by organization. Um, and then are there derailers, cultural derailers number three here. Um, there, there usually always are, we’re usually kind of, um, kicking ourselves or at least shooting ourselves in the foot sometimes on some of these things that help us, um, that cause us to regress a bit on some of the progress we make towards creating a good culture. And so we really wanna identify those things and kind of snuff them out or mitigate those experiences more for people.
Charles Rogel | 37:06
And finally, if you’re really committed, if you’re really serious about this stuff, <laugh>, it gets down to your leadership competencies. That’s one of the big, uh, areas that really creates alignment because again, people, they, they experience the values in the culture through the leaders in the organization. So if you’re senior leaders are communicating very well and in alignment and talking about the mission and values a lot too, that makes a difference. But also local leaders, my skip leader, all those people, if they’re practicing those and being held accountable to those, then you are going to, uh, get some traction here. Um, yeah. So a couple questions here. A value themed event. You know, a lot of times people will do the company barbecue and this is gonna be around our value of care or whatever that, or teamwork or something like that. So you can take any activity and attach one of your values to it and just take a moment to talk about it.
Charles Rogel | 38:02
Put up some posters, you know, name some of the food after your value. You’re just trying to get more name recognition and help people understand what that value means. And so you can really, um, you know, again, be kind of creative in how you label some of those events. And then another question here, um, have we, have we required leaders to develop their own personal mission and vision statements? You know, we haven’t done that. Um, I haven’t seen that yet. I think it’s a good idea though, because again, we’re trying to understand, well, as a leader, what do
Charles Rogel | 38:34
You value? Like what is your mission and purpose as a leader in the organization? What do you want to see happen? Hopefully it aligns with what the company is doing, but it does help them to be a little bit more intentional about how they operate when they have their own mission and purpose in terms of what they’re trying to do as a leader. Um, and then, um, let’s see, another good question here. The balance between internal and external focused values. Um, a good question. I’m not quite sure what you mean by that one, Mike. Um, but people tend to be, if I get this right, people aren’t as concerned with making money. The external kind of values of performance and achieving goals. That doesn’t mean a lot to people unless there’s some bonus or commission or something other, something other structured towards it. So, uh, generally, you know, when we talk a lot about revenue and hitting those numbers and you know, a record quarter, you know, sometimes that’s a demotivator for people.
Charles Rogel | 39:32
’cause they’re like, well, I’m not seeing any money as a result, I worked pretty hard. But, um, that’s great that the company’s doing well. They wanna see the impact it has on people. And so the more you can connect it to an experience that you’re having on an individual customer, uh, on a win that you got and a change that you made either in the environment or in society or whatever you’re doing as an organization that makes a difference to people, that makes their job feel a lot more meaningful. Um, and then internally focused, yeah, those, i, I would say or describe a little bit more as, um, you know, teamwork driven, people driven, values driven type of, um, values. Um, yeah. And then, you know, Emily makes a good point here, this job crafting idea. Um, I’ve done a little bit of research on the job crafting piece, but really you’re trying to help people understand or do an exercise with people to say, how would you craft your job and design it in a way that is most meaningful and impactful for you?
Charles Rogel | 40:30
And this is a good exercise. We do this a lot in what we call our magic training. We do training around engagement and how people can experience more engagement in their job. Magic standing for meaning, autonomy, growth, impact and connection. And so the, the job crafting piece is how would you design your job? Like how much more autonomy would you want? What are the meaningful things that you do each day that you want to do more of? Where do you need to grow as an individual? Um, and where do you want to invest in your growth at work? Are there special projects and things that you need to, uh, work on? And then, um, yes, but Emmanuel, I like this idea strength-based organization. What are our strengths as an organization? How do we, um, how do we align with those and make sure we’re purposeful about, you know, achieving those things?
Charles Rogel | 41:17
And, um, you know, several other good ideas kind of popping up in the chat here. So what I’ll kind of end with as we talk about this culture is a squishy hard thing to put your finger on. So you’re going to have to do some work to do this a lot of times. Uh, another thing I’ll add here is when you’re talking about culture, it emerges from stories and events and experiences like people, um, you know, sometimes there’s a culture derailer where, I’ll use an example again. Someone spoke up and they got fired. And so people don’t speak up anymore and give any ideas. And that that event happened five years ago and it was misremembered. They didn’t actually get fired. This happened, that happened. So whatever it is, there are, there are historical stories that occur that help define the culture that people will relate and, and, and adhere to.
Charles Rogel | 42:10
And your job is to create new stories that emphasize the new culture, the positive experiences that are helping to create the new environment that you want to create there. So as people see that happen and they have more of these new stories that really tell how we do things around here and you emphasize and celebrate some of those experiences, then people start aligning with that new piece. We’re all, we’re very story oriented as human beings. And so the more you can kind of come up with examples and case studies stories, the more, um, people buy into stuff like that. So, um, I’ll end on our last slide here. Again, expect some information from us. Everyone’s been asking for the slides. We’ll be sending those out to you as well as, um, the HRCI and SHRM code so you can get credit for participating today. Um, it’s funny, a lot of times I do these presentations and people are like, oh, I didn’t know you did employee surveys.
Charles Rogel | 43:02
We do employee surveys, we do 360 assessments, anything kind of employee feedback related. If you have questions, we’d love to talk to you more about it. Um, but I hope you got some good ideas today about how to measure and improve your culture. And, um, and best of luck, it’s a tough road. It does take multiple iterations and I’ll say multiple years even to get there because it’s a long-term strategic initiative and it takes a lot of your leadership buy-in, uh, to make it happen. So keep up the great work everyone. Appreciate you, uh, joining today and wanna encourage you to join us on our next presentation. Thanks everyone. Bye now. Bye.
