Casual Fridays, team-building trips, PlayStation, pool parties, and more. These are probably some of the first things that come to your mind when you think “company culture”, aren’t they?
Well, company culture is actually much, much more. It enables companies to understand each employee’s unique needs so they can find ways to motivate them in rather individualized ways to leverage their strengths and help them achieve peak performance.
But in order to be able to predict your employees’ performance and make them flourish at work, you first need to determine how they feel about working at your organization. The best way to do so? Run a culture index survey.
What is the culture index?
According to Deloitte, 94% of executives and 88% of employees agree that healthy workplace culture is vital to business growth.
This is why the culture index needs to be one of the most important metrics within your HR department. In the simplest of terms, a culture index shows how your employees feel about working for your organization.
Culture index allows you to determine and analyze your employees’ sentiments, attitudes, and opinions towards various aspects of their role. It can also serve as a benchmark to be compared against both internally and externally.
Why should you care about it? I get it that you’re looking for a good reason before creating and sending out a bunch of culture index surveys. Well, the culture index could show that something is not functioning within your company the way it should. Maybe your employees don’t feel motivated or engaged enough. Or perhaps they would do better if they were given adequate feedback.
There are many factors that can influence the work culture, such as employee relations, organization values, and company policies. On the other hand, there are numerous benefits an improved culture index can bring to an organization. Here are some of the most obvious ones.
Why you should measure culture index
Here we list some of the crucial benefits of measuring your organization’s culture survey index.
Higher employee and customer retention rate
People want to stay longer at companies with great work culture – therefore, companies with good workplace culture always have better employee retention rates.
A company is only as good as its employees. Or to slightly rephrase this – a company’s success is often proportional to the level of satisfaction of its employees. The fact is that happy workers mean happy clients. And happy clients keep returning to your products and services. As a company, you should also consider platforms like Hexomatic for task automation and a more productive workflow. Better customer retention also leads to better profitability and business growth.
Strategic planning
Strategic planning is vital for any company’s long-term success. But it only becomes feasible once employees are familiar with what’s going on in the company. Without adequate planning, companies risk errors in task execution. Planning, combined with good work culture, helps turn business ideas into quality products and services.
Improve processes and procedures
Knowing how your employees feel will allow you to easily spot any gaps in your processes and procedures and help bridge them. This also refers to pre-boarding, onboarding, and off-boarding procedures, as well as training, performance assessment, and so on.
Having a good culture index will also help improve hiring both by attracting top talent and by being able to assign the right role to the right people.
Easier conflict resolution
In all major organizations, conflicts happen. Whether between colleagues, employees and management, or employees and customers, it’s bound to happen at some point. The difference between great and not-so-great companies is often in the way they deal with conflicts.
Once conflict resolution has become an important part of company culture, employees will trust the management more and be happier with their everyday workplace activities.
Improve employee engagement and productivity
A study by the University of Warwick economists discovered that better employee satisfaction leads to a 12% increase in productivity, as opposed to dissatisfied employees who turned out to be 10% less productive.
The best way to improve your employees’ engagement and productivity is to listen to them when they voice opinions and concerns, and immediately act upon it. One of the easiest ways to find out about their opinions and attitudes is to run a culture index survey.
Culture index survey
A culture index survey enables the company leadership and management to obtain data that shows how their employees are doing. More importantly, it empowers well-informed decision making.
Nowadays, most cultural index surveys are run online. It’s the easiest way to distribute the surveys, gather the answers, and analyze the results. There are plenty of user-friendly and feature-rich online survey makers that let you easily collect feedback from your employees.
LeadQuizzes, for example, allows you to select from 10+ ready-made survey templates or easily create your own from scratch. This includes several HR-related surveys that can help with your culture index research.
Employee feedback survey
For example, you can use an employee feedback survey to determine how your company can better support its employees and improve its workplace culture:
Some of the things this culture index survey can help you learn about your employees:
- Identify what they might need help with (this week, this month, or in general)
- Find out what you can do to improve (Red Bull in the office, half-day Fridays, more dogs in the office, and so on)
- Get their input and suggestions about the next fun team building event
- Obtain a quantitative rating that shows their overall job satisfaction
Job satisfaction survey
Here’s another pre-made survey that can help you learn how satisfied your employees are with the job and the workplace atmosphere at your organization:
This is a more in-depth culture index survey based on a Likert scale. It helps you find out how meaningful, challenging, and stressful your employees find their job, as well as how satisfied they are with their salary, benefits, projects, colleagues, managers, and more.
To encourage participation and honest answers, you can reassure your respondents that their answers will be anonymous (provided that they really will) and assure them that the responses will be used to improve the working environment and employee-related company policies.
NPS survey
We also suggest that you include an NPS-like question or send out a separate Net Promoter Score survey like this:
This way, you’ll gather both qualitative and quantitative data and would be able to determine your company’s culture index more precisely. It allows you to calculate Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) and learn more about employee loyalty and whether your employees would recommend your company to their acquaintances.
Finally, keep in mind that the best practices show that companies should assess their culture index at least twice a year to make sure they don’t miss a change in employees’ sentiment and avoid failing to react promptly.
If you’re looking for a quick and user-friendly way to create a survey, just log in to your existing LeadQuizzes account and start building from scratch or edit one of our professionally made survey templates. Not a user yet? Sign up for a free 14-day trial and use all the templates you want for free during that period!
