Measuring organisational culture | S1 E27 cover art

Measuring organisational culture | S1 E27

Measuring organisational culture | S1 E27

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 Measuring organisational culture In this episode of Engaging Internal Comms, The Big Picture People’s Craig Smith talks to Victoria Bond about measuring organisational culture. Victoria is Director at Space HR Ltd. – a new HR consultancy that helps organisations to maximise the value of their teams, their people, and their culture. Victoria’s extensive career includes several senior HR roles in organisations, including Manchester Airport and The Access Group. She is passionate about helping organisations to better measure and understand what their employees are thinking and feeling, thus finding ways to help their leaders to respond to that feedback in real time. The difference culture can make in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Victoria points out how management often focuses too heavily on profits and sales, when it’s the engagement of its people that can truly make the difference, especially when merging or introducing potential investors, or acquisitioning. “They are overlooking the value that having a really great team is adding to their business,” Victoria says. “A lot of conversations I have with clients are around really maximising the value and the performance in their business through really turning up the volume of employee engagement.” Victoria talks about how investors or potential buyers are looking for healthy culture and the feel of a successful business that runs on the fuel of engaged and innovative employees. “If somebody is coming in to value your business, and they’ve had a terrible experience from the people who work there, while you’re going to take points off, you’re going to take pounds off the value of that business.” The added value of engaged employees is a value that is not only identified by potential investors and buyers, it is also a value that allows management to present the company in a confident pitch. Victoria explains the difference it made to her in her experience, when she was HR director presenting her well-cultured company. “It helped that I was able to passionately and articulately talk about our talent, and the thing we were doing,” she says. “We could talk about the levels of engagement in our business; we could talk about the length of service and loyalty that we had from our team. And that was backed up by the owners and the other operational leaders in the room.” When focus is not solely placed on sales and profits, and instead attentive of people engagement, the culture that cascades throughout the organisation strengthens the spine of the company. This adds exponential value to a company’s investors and potential buyers. How can organisational culture be measured? Whether organisations have identified that they need to improve engagement amongst their people, or they already have a strong and healthy culture, they must be able to measure their successes and failures. This is critical to preventing failures in engagement from being identified in the early stages, and in identifying where a company may be struggling in order to improve people engagement. Victoria outlines a couple of physical indicators that demonstrate a company has a good employee engagement strategy:
  • Incentive schemes – appropriately managed and working effectively
  • Rewarding and supportive employee contracts
  • Succession planning, with personal development programmes for key players
However, a lot of monitoring of employee engagement can be based on the general feeling within an organisation, and it’s crucial that this has regular pulse checks. Victoria gives a few pointers:
  • Are the leaders and managers inspirational and good at leading change, with the ability to lead their teams through big change transitions?
  • Are employees connecting and...
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