Engineering a high-performance culture: A data-driven approach
How cultural analytics is changing our definition of culture.
Why everybody’s talking about company culture
Everyone’s talking about company culture these days, and with good reason. With 70% of employees in the U.S. not engaged at work, and another 15% actively disengaged* it’s clear that organizations need to prioritize improving their culture to drive performance and success.
Let’s start by defining (or redefining) what exactly we mean by ‘culture.’ While shared values are often associated with culture, it encompasses much more. Culture is about people and their mindsets – the shared beliefs, customs, practices, and social behaviors of a group or society. To create a high-performing culture, we need to understand these mindsets, measure their impact on performance and develop the capabilities to shift them.
Thankfully, with advancements in technology, we now have accurate and quantifiable means of doing this. Platforms like Transformation Cloud™ use sophisticated algorithms to gather real-time analytics on employee perspectives and drive cultural transformation. For instance, JMJ’s DEV:Q diagnostic measures perspectives across 40 predictors of leadership capability and organizational alignment, such as work satisfaction, preferred working styles, and levels of role involvement.
With a detailed snapshot of their current culture, organizations are able to reliably predict risks and take proactive steps to mitigate them. Additionally, the data can be used to identify the density of specific employee types prevalent in different business functions, allowing organizations to outline the characteristics of a high-performance culture that embraces change, innovation, and growth. Armed with this understanding, organizations can develop a roadmap to create this type of culture. This might include providing personal development opportunities like personalized training programs, mentorship, or job shadowing as well as establishing platforms for people to contribute their own ideas and solutions to challenges.
To ensure continuous improvement, it’s important to regularly collect data on employee mindsets and use it to inform decision-making over time. This ensures that the organization is always adapting and evolving to meet the changing needs of its employees and customers, even in the most unpredictable business landscape.
If it can be measured, it can be predicted and engineered
The movie ‘Moneyball’ popularized the idea that if something can be measured, it can be predicted. This concept extends beyond baseball and into the realm of organizational development. By quantifying work orientation and role preference, leaders can engineer a culture that maximizes performance and minimizes risk. DEV:Q data can be used to plot a group of mindsets, illustrating the distribution of a group of workers, organized by any demographic, psychographic or geographic dimension. This can be correlated to other performance metrics to build a more comprehensive illustration of ‘why’ the trends in the performance data might be occurring and change the pattern. Imagine what leaders could accomplish if they knew the perfect mix of players – executives, manager, supervisors and front line – that could be aligned to form the optimal team to achieve any organizational objective.
When it comes to managing an organization’s culture, relying on guesswork or a haphazard approach is not an effective strategy. Just as we carefully monitor and manage our financial performance, we must take a strategic and data-driven approach to shaping our culture. The bottom line is that a company’s culture plays a critical role in its short and long-term success and its development and longevity requires commitment. So let’s stop talking about culture and start actively engineering it for success!
If you would like to learn more about how DEV:Q and JMJ’s Transformation Cloud™ can help you understand and engineer a high-performance culture. Contact us.