Culture is more than a buzzword; it's the secret to attracting the best talent and retaining your best employees. And with so much competition out there, it's critical your company stand out.
Since we now live in a world driven by analytics and metrics, it is only natural to ask the question, “How do we measure the success and effectiveness of our company culture?”
Why Is Company Culture So Important?
To answer that question and to set up any useful form of measurement, we must return to the core issue of culture and why it is so important. While there are many different corporate cultures that help create great companies, they all go back to the same roots. Here are four questions to ask to determine the success of your company culture:
- Are you attracting the right type of talent?
- Are you retaining the talent you attract?
- Are you achieving your company goals for productivity and profit?
- Are you supporting a brand that is loved by loyal and engaged customers?
Of course, other companies will add other elements, such as having fun, investing in the community, and even creating pride in being a part of their team, but we believe these four questions are a must.
Find out how to make your office more fun with tips from our own team!
In reality, however, these are actually results or characteristics of that successful culture. For example, if the type of employees you want are those who are concerned about their communities, a culture that includes volunteer programs will attract and retain those job-seekers.
If these four end results are what culture is all about in the simplest terms, you will want to evaluate each of them independently.
Company Cultures To Study
The very successful Zappos management places a high priority on the concept of connectedness in the company to support its core values. To measure its success in supporting this connectedness (and recruiting their team members) the company employs a number of tools. This includes a Face Game that, along with FaceMail, encourages employees to know each other and to put faces with names.
While these processes helped reinforce the concept of connectedness, it’s effectiveness is regularly measured with an internal feedback system called Z60.
Measuring the success of a culture also allows for some quantitative data about the company’s financial success, customer satisfaction levels, and such things as the number of returns. These metrics are part of a comprehensive approach to culture and ensure that a company is not all about trying to create an artificial “feel-good” environment that loses a necessary focus on results.
Sears Roebuck, for example, has fought a difficult battle over culture. It was once the world’s most successful retailer, a status that bred arrogance and indifference in many of its employees and managers. To combat this and react to the changing retail environment, the company put in a program to retrain its people to focus on the customer.
Check out these other companies that rock their company culture.
However, rather than judging the real results of the program, management simply kept tally of the number of people who went through the training.
Your measures of success for your culture must realistically accommodate your corporate goals and the environment that is necessary to effectively achieve them.
How To Create A Great Culture
Creating a great company culture won't happen overnight. First, you must really understand your company's goals in order to find out hot to attract new talent, instill loyalty in your employees, drives sales and strengthen customer relationships. The first step is laying the right foundation.
You can't have an incredible culture without an incredible business. But if you have a solid foundation in place, your employees have something to rally behind.
So where do you start? You get my new book, The Golden Toilet. In this book, I'll teach you the marketing secrets high-growth brands swear by—and how you can create a holistic system to keep your business.
