Measuring Culture Change
- How do you measure culture change? Many organizations use periodic employee surveys to assess culture change. While understanding and acknowledging employee perception is important, employee sentiment is a subjective measure relative to each employee's assumptions and experiences. How one employee perceives "innovation" might be very different from how other employees perceive it.
- Here are some examples of quantitative measures for the 8 most frequent behaviors I come across in today's organization culture changes.
Accountability | - On-time delivery- Number of decision-makers involved in each decision- Length of time issues remain unresolved |
Customer Focus | - Number of customer focus groups or interviews to solicit input on product development- Number of open customer issues- Response time to satisfactorily close customer issues / complaints |
Collaboration | - Percentage of initiatives being implemented by cross-functional teams- Number of cross-organization interest groups- Results of organization network analysis |
Data-Driven Decision Making | - Business cases-to-project start ratio- Number of programs sunset due to low return on investment- Number of decisions made with no data |
Diversity | - Number of diverse demographics (e.g., age, gender, race) represented on executive and senior leadership teams- Average firm tenure on teams- Number of external thought partners included in information-gathering activity |
Enterprise Thinking | - Number of exceptions to company policy- Percentage of programs or policies that apply company-wide- Number of decisions that involve compromise at the division level to maximize benefit to the enterprise |
Innovation | - Number of experiments- Time between test-learn-retest cycles- Number of failures |
Results Orientation | - Percentage of programs with SMART outcomes set- Percentage of goals met- Number of projects using Kanban boards to visually track work progress |
These are only examples -- you can come up with better ones for your organization! While defining the right set of measures is important, even more important is using them: establish a starter set of quantitative measures, collect data, evaluate progress, and evolve the culture change plan as necessary to achieve adoption of the desired set of behaviors. Marisa Sanchez
What is the meaning of Organization Development (OD)? Why do it? Who does it benefit and how?Organization development is a broad field that draws from a number of disciplines and can be applied to any organized (or disorganized!) group of people. Based in human behavior theories and values, the goal is to build and sustain effective organizations by leveraging the knowledge and experience within the organization. This newsletter serves as a vehicle to inspire you to use organizationdevelopment in your own work.