Measuring the impact of culture?
September 12, 2024
by a searcher from University of Florida - Warrington College of Business Administration in Miami, FL, USA
Hey everyone,
How do you measure how good your "culture" is in your acquisitions?
I think we all mostly work on gut feeling, but are there any good ways to actually measure performance as it relates to culture?
In other words, at what point do you say "we have a good culture" vs "we have a bad culture"?
Thanks!
from Millersville University of Pennsylvania in Mantua Township, NJ, USA
We aren't perfect and we still have plenty of issues to over come. I've even screwed up as a new leader. But the team is learning to trust each other and trust me and understand that we will all make mistakes, myself included, and that we're here to make each other stronger.
So how do I measure if we have good culture. To your point, I've been in organizations that have bad culture. It's obvious. It's palpable and you can just tell it's not good. When you have good culture you can equally see and feel it.
Is this something you can diligence pre-acquisition...I don't have a good answer for that. I think tenure can play a role...but I've been at two companies now that had terrible culture and very tenured people. Even sour bad people can be encouraged to stay with golden handcuffs, when leaderships incentives are more about making money than how you get there.
And I'm going to say this, knowing one of my key people and culture leaders doesn't like being on video...but if they're involved in making social media content, and have bios on the companies website, and it's more than a picture and a link to their LinkedIn profile. And the company is trying to show some of the humanity that is their team...to me those are good indicators that culture is something that is being actively cultivated and developed at that company. Whether or not it's the right culture for you as a buyer/operator is a different questions, but it doesn't mean that the company doesn't have a good culture.
from University of Florida in Atlanta, GA, USA
I am an EOS implementer who pivoted to using the framework System & Soul (S2) because it has so much more around values, culture, people development, etc... The info below is from the System & Soul framework.
As part of the S2 implementation, we run a few workshops in the first 30 days around values, culture, and org habits. We call this The Culture Equation (VALUES + ORG HABITS = CULTURE). We also score each leader against the company values we have defined to see how well the leader FITs in the organization.
“While successful culture can look and feel like magic, the truth is that it’s not. Culture is a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.” — Daniel Coyle, The Culture Code
I went ahead and shared the details behind our Culture Equation workshops in the google doc below so you can use them on your own to measure and define the culture you want inside your organization. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jM9X5anLtSfsgCx0fNQ0rylMv-M1fgVmjSQ6KGzvsBc/edit?usp=sharing
If you want a simple culture assessment that takes 5 minutes you can do the Culture Fix survey below. This will help you understand how strong your workplace culture is and what you can do to take it to the next level. But it is too high level in my opinion. Culture requires a dialog between the people inside the organization. https://www.theculturefix.works/S2-culture-check-up-survey
Reach out if you have any questions.