Raise your hand if you have experienced this at least once in your life: your employer conducts a climate survey. They get their results. They are not great, and they do nothing about it.
You are not alone. It is a common scenario.
Most companies still fail to understand that conducting a climate survey means committing to act on its results. And that they need to take steps to address the issues identified. If they fail to follow through on this commitment, employees will assume that their voices do not matter and that the leadership is not acting on the problems.
Organizational culture is one of the fundamental elements leaders need to focus on when building a foundation for sustainable growth and talent retention. The culture of an organization can make a significant impact on talent retention and employee engagement. It can also hugely impact business profitability and bottom line.
Gallup found that employee engagement has increased at an unprecedented rate during the last decade thanks to the emergence of “high-development cultures”. Their study shows how several organizations with high-development cultures managed to track the increase of their employee engagement rates from less than 20% to over 70%.
Organizational culture impacts and encompasses many different elements of an organization, including its processes, strategy, and communication. Company culture stands for the set of values, expectations, and behaviors that guide the actions, decisions, and interactions of the members of a team. Culture is dynamic and evolves as the company grows. Many leaders strive to find a way to monitor culture and to cultivate it to support company growth. Being able to achieve this is what will set successful company cultures apart from the rest.
“Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are, it’s something you do”
There are not many effective ways to measure or quantify the appreciation of company culture. One of them is to use climate surveys to keep a pulse on company culture and identify ways to impact it positively. The purpose of climate surveys is to assess employee experience at a company and identify the drivers that make their experience positive or negative. By approaching culture in this way, leaders can take action on elements that can significantly improve their company culture and track these elements over time.
The use of climate surveys has been a common practice for decades. However, most HR leaders run into time-related and data analysis barriers and sometimes fail to take action from them.
In turn, this creates the opposite effect and leads to a loss of trust from employees feeling let down by a lack of follow-through or action. Climate surveys can be a strong strategy for HR leaders and a powerful tool to reduce turnover and increase employee engagement. It is one of the most effective tools available to impact company culture positively and the best way to equip HR professionals with valuable data.
Over the last 18 months, most companies reacted to ongoing change and uncertainty by surveying their employees. Most surveys conducted only focused on remote work and how to plan for the return to the office.Conducting employee surveys on timely topics is crucial to understand their current needs, but a climate survey needs to be a part of a more comprehensive and long-term strategy..
The following steps are a great way to set up your climate survey strategy for success and guarantee it serves as a tool to improve your company culture.
Create a communication plan: Like with any other initiative, it is of utmost importance to explain to your people why you have decided to implement this type of survey. If you explain the reason behind the initiative, people are more likely to trust and willingly engage with its purpose.
Share your climate survey results and action plans: UOne of the most common reasons individuals tend not to answer surveys is the lack of immediate feedback surveys often have. Beaconforce’s methodology and product encourage continuous feedback. When it comes to climate surveys, this means sharing company results, milestones, or goals set based on the climate survey results.
Integrate results into your culture: Running a climate survey should never be the end goal. There is no reason to collect any data if you are not planning to act on it. A climate survey will improve your company culture when it helps you to identify drivers or behaviors that easily integrate into your employees’ day-to-day work lives. With Beaconforce’s Climate Survey Premium Template you will be able to track the seven drivers that impact culture.
Plan the frequency of your survey: Company culture is constantly changing and evolving as your company grows. Climate surveys cannot be a one-time thing or a once-a-year report. Following trends over time will be crucial in monitoring how your actions have positively impacted your company culture.
The global crisis has reshaped the way we work. We are now facing a time of unprecedented change, and a great opportunity lies ahead as the Great Resignation is upon us. More and more companies are considering staying remote forever or offering hybrid models because people are quitting their jobs to look for companies with a culture that matches their needs and values and can offer them a better work environment.
Now is the perfect time for leaders and HR professionals to devote some time to look at their company culture and make plans on what to do to improve it..
Plan 1
Light Pulse
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