Before an organization embarks on a culture renovation, it should first understand what the current culture is and how it is perceived by key stakeholders and influencers. Two-thirds of organizations that report successfully transforming their cultures started by gathering sentiment and related data from key stakeholders to understand how they viewed the existing culture and what they’d like the new culture to be.
Too often, members of the senior leadership team assume they know what the culture represents. Too often, they are wrong.
3M didn’t make that mistake. The 100-year old perennial innovation leader is sparking its own cultural renovation under new CEO, Mike Roman, which began with seeking to understand the culture that was in place.
“We engaged the top leadership team. We created advisory panels to be able to tap into their views, and we established a cross-functional core team,” said Kristen Ludgate, SVP of HR. “We then took some early thinking out into the organization through crowdsourcing. That deep listening has been really important. And, of course, deep listening is itself a way to announce a change of culture.”
Like 3M, Ford Motor Company saw an opportunity to bring together a diverse group of interested employees from all experience levels and functions to define their vision of Ford’s culture and generate ideas to bring that culture to life.
One way the company accomplished this was inviting employees to the Ford Culture Hackathon, the aim of which was to engage employees in discovering:
- What employees loved about the current culture and wanted to see fortified
- What about the culture needed to be fixed
- What wasn’t present in the current culture that employees wanted to see in the future
Dialogue based on the answers set the tone for a two-day event, where employees worked in randomly selected teams to #hackFORDculture and generate ideas to fortify elements of the culture they loved and fix elements that weren’t serving the company well.
The concept of employee listening has been greatly aided recently through technology. Natural Language Processing (NLP), coupled with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), is giving companies a way to analyze employee sentiment without having to manually read every employee survey comment. It is also doing this in real-time so that employee sentiment can be captured based on current events and activities—in an employee’s own words vs. pre-canned answer options in a Likert scale—and in opposition to the traditional annual employee engagement survey, which has become an ineffective tool.
i4cp’s Caution: The Annual Employee Engagement Survey is Not an Effective Measure of Culture
Nearly nine in 10 (89%) of those surveyed reported the use of their all-employee engagement survey as a mechanism to measure and/or monitor their organizational culture. But i4cp research shows no statistical relationship between using the employee engagement survey for this purpose and the firm’s ability to improve market performance or to achieve a healthy culture.
It’s been evident over the last few years that companies are moving away from the annual engagement survey for a variety of reasons: too slow, too cumbersome, too expensive, and not actionable enough.
Fewer organizations are relying on this traditional tool to accurately gauge employee sentiment—the speed of business is simply too fast for the traditional engagement survey to provide accurate data. Instead, they are moving to more frequent, rapid, easier methods to gather sentiment, and to analyze it more efficiently and effectively in order to act more quickly
