Conduct an audit of your organization's existing culture.

Have you been wondering how you can conduct a formal assessment of your organization's culture? Why not use the end of the year to measure the strength of your culture and identify opportunities to enhance your workplace environment, as a means of attracting and retaining top talent in 2023?

Here are ten (10) questions you can ask your Leadership Team, to get the ball rolling...

1. Have you conducted an employee census?

NOTE: An employee census is a point in time “snapshot” of all the people in your organization. This process entails counting your people by job title, type of position (full-time permanent, part-time temporary, consultant, etc.), their functional area, the project teams they work on, etc.

2.   Do you administer a personality assessment for all your employees, to help them understand their preferred manner of interacting with their peers, and understand how to adapt their behavior to build strong relationships with their fellow employees? If you do administer such behavioral assessments, how do you use the results to increase your people's productivity, performance and thus your aggregate workforce profitability?

3. On a scale of 1-5 (1 lowest; 5 highest) what degree of confidence do you have that you are maximizing your return on your “people” investment, which is simply your employee ROI?  

4. Do you conduct an assessment of your company’s Quality of Hiring (QoH)    

NOTE: Performance, productivity, and retention are three commonly used criteria to determine an organization’s QoH:

            I.       Performance: the average of all your new hire performance ratings.

          II.       Productivity: defined by goal achievement using Key Performance Indicators.

        III.       Retention: the percent of all your new hires on-boarded during the current year, that are still employed at the end of the year.

How can/do you apply these three metrics in your QoH? For example, if your organization scored an 80%, 85%, and 90% on these three, then the average QoH achieved is 85%, a B to B+ scoring range. The value in this exercise comes from comparing your aggregate QoH results to industry benchmarks, or ideally the QoH of world-class organizations with amazing workplace culture reputations.

5. Do you conduct employee performance reviews? If no, that is a powerful place to start for the end of 2022. If you do, how frequently? Once a year isn't nearly enough, and ideally monthly or every other month gives you a deeper insight into how your people are doing.

6. Which type of goal-setting strategy do you use with your people? Smart, stretch, goldilocks, other, none?

7. Who establishes your employee’s goals/Key Performance Indicators? your employees, their Managers, employees and Managers jointly, or no one?

8. Do you have a Succession Plan? If yes, wonderful. How is it implemented. If not, that is a serious risk management/continuity challenge to your organization's very survival.

9. Does your Company enable your employees to have autonomy over their work by allowing them to choose who they work with, when they work, where they work from, and how they get their work done?

10. Do you conduct employee engagement, empowerment (satisfaction) surveys?

By answering these questions honestly, your Leadership Team can identify the framework for a culture that either is or is not delivering a competitive advantage in differentiating your organization's reputational brand to existing and potential clients, your current employees and the workforce at large. Let me know if you would like to receive the formal culture audit survey.