When employees express themselves, how do you measure their feelings? There’s no designated scale to do it. But you can analyze it with a culture index. You can analyze and know whether what they feel is good, bad or neutral. The index also offers a benchmark that can be compared to internally and externally both.
LEARN ABOUT: Candidate Experience Survey
What is culture index?
Definition: A culture index is defined as the representation of how your workforce feels about being employed in the organization. This includes their sentiments, opinions, and attitude about the different attributes of their roles and responsibilities.
An organization hires employees at different levels. Typically managers are hired to strategize the overall working of their respective teams and to maintain the workplace climate. They are given the responsibility to help their team and ensure its smooth functioning.
When an organization wants to gauge how it’s employees feel they deploy an employee survey if they have to survey the entire organization but if it’s only a few members then they fall back on the managers for the first-hand report.
The index might suggest that something is not working right with the organization. For example, employees are not engaged enough, because they don’t receive enough feedback from their managers. Lack of feedback translates into low levels of inspiration and employee engagement.
Why Culture Index Is So Important?
Let’s imagine two organizations: A and B.
Organization A has extremely high employee turnover, lack of employee Net Promoter Score and is low in levels of engagement. This has increased both the product and human resources costs. Most people in the team are new and have no idea what is going on.
On the contrary, there is organization B, that has no such problems. Instead, employees in this organization enjoy coming to work, are highly motivated, take responsibilities of the tasks assigned to them and are proactive.
What makes organization B stand out? What do you think they are doing right to retain their top talents. How are they engaging their employees? Why are the employees happier than in organization A? The reasons can be many and well-distinguished but what stands out always is workplace culture.
Ultimately it is the culture of an organization that makes all the difference. Organizations that have a good culture, experience lower attrition, higher levels of engagement and employees who take ownership.
According to a study conducted by Columbia University, the turn over rate is approximately 13.9% for organizations that have higher levels of satisfaction. As compared to the 48.4% of the ones that do not!
Happier employees also keep it ringing at the cash counter. According to a study conducted by the University of Warwick, happier employees contribute to 12% more than the average employees. Hence, a positive and strong workplace culture is essential.
LEARN ABOUT: Work culture
Culture index survey
Employee surveys help leadership and HR Managers with data that lets them know how their employee processes are doing. It arms them with data that helps them make informed decisions. Before conducting employee surveys, kindly consider the below points.
Culture index survey tool
Using an online survey platform or software to measure your organization’s culture index is a good start. These tools are robust, user-friendly, provide in-depth analytics, and support massive number of surveys and responses. You can assign a frequency, decide on the types of surveys based on your needs and requirements, and start conducting surveys.
Culture index survey program
Organizations that conduct employee surveys enjoy high levels of employee engagement, workforce productivity, staff retention, and employee morale. It is a good idea to design a survey program before you implement it so that you have a plan to stick to. You can follow the below steps to conduct a successful culture index assessment.
- Deploy surveys: Define the focus of the survey, based on that you will design the questionnaire. Once you have the questionnaire ready, you can send it out to relevant people. With online survey platforms, you can select the type and number of employees you want to send to their job titles, departments, etc.
- Gather responses: Conducting surveys is just the first step. Once you’ve done that, you will have a ton of data to peruse. You have to look at all the data and use it to examine your current processes, revamp them, and launch new ones.
- Data analysis: Online survey tools provide a detailed analysis of your surveys and the data gathered from them. You can view trends over time to see what’s worked or not. Question Workforce’s ‘Trends‘ widget lets you track, analyze, and measure any number of survey measures over time. You can calculate Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) using that; it lets you know about employee loyalty; if your employees will recommend your organization to their loved ones or not. It enables you to assign role-based access to the managers that you select. You can use this data and start developing action plans.
Culture index assessment
Culture index assessment helps in gathering data and identifying gap areas in areas such as employee retention strategy, strategic planning, employee recruitment, training & development, and conflict resolution. Engaged employees stay longer with organizations, make a discretionary effort, are excellent advocates, and better team players. The assessment helps in knowing how engaged employees are and their intent to stay.
What are the benefits of measuring culture index?
Since culture index truly represents how employees feel about working in the organization, it brings to the fore many aspects. Some of these might not be known but surely need attention. Many aspects could highlight what changes are necessary to improve your work culture and employee processes. Here are the top 7 reasons why culture index is important:
1. Better employee retention
Organizations that have a good culture often see a higher retention rate. Employees are happier and there is enthusiasm in the air. Employees go above and beyond to get things done and make sure the organization achieves its goals. The culture index will help analyze the level of happiness of your organization.
2. Client retention
Remember this; happy employees mean happy customers. Happy customers keep coming back to you for products or services or both. Customer retention is essential for economic growth. It takes a huge amount fo time, resources and finance to acquire a new customer. Therefore customer retention is the key and your employees can ensure that.
3. Strategic planning
Strategic planning is the key to success for any organization. If there is no planning there is no error-free execution of the tasks assigned. Planning helps an organization implement their ideas into reality. Strategic planning can only be implemented if employees are in sync with what is happening in the organization.
4. Conflict resolution
Whatever the nature of the conflict is organizations should focus on resolving it. Whether it is between employees or between employees and customers organizations should look at conflict resolution as the key to improving the overall environment at work. When conflict resolution becomes an integral part of organizational behavior, employees tend to be happy and believe more in top-level management.
5. Improve your people processes
Culture index lets you know precisely what and how employees feel. This easily enables you to spot any gap areas in your processes and helps bridge them. This helps in improving your process right from pre-boarding to off-boarding. When it comes to employees, they go through a lot of processes for on-boarding, performance appraisal, training, etc. It is quite possible that these processes may have some areas of improvement. Culture index is a good way of spotting those and revamping them for good.
6. Improve your hiring
A culture index helps identify what role is best suited for which employee. Are they happy with the responsibilities? Are they doing justice to the role? Once you have that data and start analyzing it, you can make informed decisions to hire the right people in the right role. This not only reduces employee attrition but also improves staff productivity and workforce engagement.
Employees are your best advocates. If they appreciate your hiring practices, they will certainly help you hire talent through positive word of mouth.
7. Boost your employee engagement and productivity
Employees will voice their opinions, ideas, and concerns based on their experiences in the organization. If you listen to it and act on it, your staff will be assured that management cares. This will reflect positively in your culture index. This is crucial as it will positively influence your organization’s work culture, staff engagement, workforce productivity, staff productivity, intent to stay, and the discretionary effort.
Finally, organizational culture goes beyond ping pong tables and casual Fridays. You need to find new ways of keeping your employees motivated. Providing your employees with a good work environment is the least you can do.
Culture index will provide you with the information needed to understand what your workforce thinks and how it reacts. Culture index helps an organization stay on the correct path and maneuver the right course of action, that will ultimately lead an organization on to the greater path of success.
QuestionPro Workforce aids the efforts of HR managers and lets them monitor and measure workforce engagement, productivity, etc. Try the platform, it’s simple and super easy to use.
