Research reveals need for fundamental rethink in the way organisations assess corporate culture
Alderbrooke, the people analytics and executive search consultancy, has called for businesses to change the way they measure organisational culture, after its research revealed serious flaws in traditional cultural measurement techniques. Having conducted five separate research projects and sampling more than 50,000 business people over a period of seven years, Alderbrooke has identified the essential components that allow organisations to accurately measure their culture for the first time.
Amongst its other findings, the research showed that values and behaviours are intrinsically linked, which means that gauging personal or organisational values and behaviours in the right way can help businesses to identify their current culture and even predict future behaviour patterns.
The research also revealed that traditional methods of measuring and interpreting workforce data must also improve. More in depth assessments and algorithms that go beyond job-fit results can help companies to build stronger teams and predict business performance more effectively.
In order to address these issues, Alderbrooke designed a behavioural analytic engine called CultureScope, the first tool to compare the perceived culture of an organisation with the behaviours of an individual employee.
Several organisations are already using CultureScope to identify their culture, improve individual and team performance, analyse risk, hire the right talent, facilitate and track cultural change, and more. This assessment produces results that are unique to each business, looking at the behavioural traits of an individual against the perceived culture of their team, the company and even the board members.
The tool is not only industry-agnostic, but also extremely flexible. It can be easily customised to reflect the cultural values most relevant to the company’s organisational strategy, which means that any cultural maintenance, change or integration can be initiated according to the specific results that CultureScope produces.
Commenting on the findings of the research, Hani Nabeel, talent and assessment partner at Alderbrooke, said:
“While there is no silver bullet when it comes to changing an organisation’s culture, we’ve finally made it possible for businesses to accurately measure it.
“Most tools that claim to measure culture really profile employee personality, whereas CultureScope measures specific behaviours in a variety of corporate circumstances. As a result, organisational culture is no longer an abstract concept relegated to the fringes of executive decision making. It can now influence the most important aspects of business growth strategy.”
Kevin Hills, partner, corporate integrity at EY, said:
“The historical ways for measuring culture are very labour intensive. It therefore can be a very expensive exercise, which unfortunately means in the context of audit and internal audit it is not really a viable option. However, we think there is an option to measure culture by deploying the latest data analytics techniques.
“CultureScope is allowing us to open up these new avenues and in that sense I think it can be very disruptive. It could help to fundamentally change the way in which we provide audit services.”