What is a Culture Health Check survey?
The Culture Health Check survey is a tool that gives you the ability to measure, monitor, and manage your company culture at an individual, team, and organisational level.
Designed and built by MyPeople, and perfected over our 20 years’ experience of building great teams, it involves a 50 point survey and forms part of our Team Culture product.
What are the benefits of a Team Culture survey?
- Offer each employee a voice, diagnose and bridge the gap, if it exists, between your current culture and the culture your organisation hopes to achieve.
- Prevent stressors, burnout, flight risk, and loss of productivity before they happen, reducing attrition rates, improving employee attraction, and increasing retention.
- Analyse both individual and collective relationships in the workplace, helping managers to establish trust-based relationships with employees.
- Assess the workplace factors affecting your teams and deploy your culture champions to promote the conditions needed for your people to thrive.
- Generate actionable insights for your organisation to improve and help your company and your people work better together.
- Protect your culture from rapid scaling. Losing top performers, disengaged teams, workload imbalances, and new hires not fitting your culture, are just some of the problems that can arise from rapid scaling.
But what happens after the survey? How do you communicate the results of a Culture Health Check Survey to your teams?
1. Thank everyone for taking part
Without honesty and employee participation, the results of your survey are meaningless. So ensure you make time to thank all participants for taking part.
Explain the reasons for the survey; You want the company to be a better place to work, you want your employees to feel engaged and aligned to the company’s purpose, and that you want your workplace to enable your employees to feel happy, secure, and included – emphasise, if there are steps that need to be taken to make this happen, you are willing to take them.
Communicate the importance of a strong company culture to your teams and discuss what a positive workplace culture may look like for them.
2. Provide an expected timeline for communicating results
Provide employees with a timeline for when you will share insights with them, the key findings, and when they can expect actions to be made.
Time is the essence. By sharing high level results swiftly, it will illustrate the value your organisation places on culture, relationships, and its people within the company.
3. Share and discuss results with leadership
Discuss the findings with the key leaders in the business, including the themes and actions that can be taken to change or protect your cultural strengths. Consider how you can use your strengths to improve your weaknesses and compare your results with external sectors and geographic benchmarks, to understand the wider picture of your results – this will enable you to see if there are common patterns evolving in your industry. Most importantly, encourage conversations to debate and decide on an action plan moving forwards. Our Team Culture product (Standard & Enterprise plans) automatically generate insights using machine learning, to assist in developing a strategy.
4. Share initial findings and company-wide results
Firstly, share company-wide results. These should be communicated to the whole company. This could include participation rates, overall scores, high-level insights, and themes – as well as comparing results to previous surveys (if applicable). Remind everyone that results are anonymised – there are still likely to be some who feel afraid they will be singled out.
If previous Culture Health Check surveys have taken place, this is a good opportunity to identify what areas of improvement can be seen – and where the company may still need to focus their attention.
5. Discuss team level findings with specific managers and teams
Review team-specific results with managers first, and then encourage them to relay the findings to their individual teams. Ensure no participants are easily identifiable, as this will reduce trust and participation in future surveys.
Focus on positive results first – identify the teams’ strengths, and then move onto more constructive feedback. If there are team-specific issues, communicate action plans, timelines, and what specific steps the organisation is taking to resolve the issues.
6. Follow up on action plans
It is no good formulating a plan and then not actioning it. Set out clear guidelines, aims, and timelines based on the invaluable insight generated by the Culture Health Check. Keep tracking how you are meeting those deadlines by scheduling an annual regular Culture Health Check survey.
What next?
A Culture Health Check survey should not be a once-off occurrence. Once complete, there is a benchmark for comparing future survey results – so make measuring your culture regularly a norm within your organisation. Show your employees that a strong company culture is integral for organisational success and that the business will act when required to enable the culture in your workplace is the best it can be.
After all, as Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, says “An organisation’s ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.”
To find out more about our Culture Health Check Survey and our Team Culture product, please contact us.
