The current pandemic has radically altered how businesses operate, creating significant changes to business strategies, workplace culture and the employee experience. Maintaining a strong organisational culture despite these challenges is essential for any business as they pivot to navigate through the current uncertainty.
Seek employee input
Some of your team are likely to be experiencing high levels of stress and anxiety as their everyday life continues to be disrupted. Proactively seeking their input, listening to their feedback, and incorporating insights into the way you lead your teams is a critical during this challenging time. Workplaces that are built on relationships, interaction and problem-solving tend to thrive. Listening develops trust between leadership and employees and provides crucial insights to guide what’s needed.
Traditional methods for assessing workplace culture like annual employee engagement studies alone are insufficient for keeping a real time pulse on the health of a businesses culture during times of rapid change. Organisations must integrate additional assessment methods and review them regularly. Here are my favourite methods for assessing workplace culture that goes beyond the employee engagement survey.
- Pulse Surveys
Checking in with employees through pulse surveys is an important way to monitor their engagement, identify gaps and keep the culture strong – especially when some or all employees are working remotely. Pulse surveys provide valuable insights about how employees are managing through waves of change and what is needed to support them. When used consistently (every two weeks is optimal) pulse surveys can help teams stay focused on delivering key priorities.
Pulse surveys should be short and easy to complete. Present questions in a multiple-choice or scaled format with minimal open-ended questions. This makes data analysis fast and allows for trend monitoring. The faster leaders discover insights, the faster they can act.
- Employee NPS score
The Employee Net Promoter Score (ENPS) asks employees, on a scale from 0-10, how likely they are to recommend their company as a place to work. An organisation’s ENPS score is calculated using a formula that considers the number of “promoters” (those who answer 9 or 10) and “detractors” (those who answer 0-6). The ENPS is useful as a baseline measure as it’s a direct reflection of the health of workplace culture. Businesses should aim for strong scores and continuous improvement.
- Retention and recruitment KPI’s
Research shows engaged employees are motivated and inspired to accomplish work at a higher quality, with better results. Businesses with healthy workplace cultures can attract and retain top talent, giving them a competitive advantage long after the pandemic. Businesses that benchmark and set retention and recruitment targets can then implement innovative strategies to make the business a better or more desirable place to work. Retention and recruitment KPI’s track average tenure length and how long it takes to fill a role. If average tenure length decreases and/or the time it takes to fill a role increases, this could indicate a problem in the organisation’s workplace culture. Use these KPI’s any time you’re doing strategic planning and assess them when facing a retention issue or recruiting for a highly competitive role.
