"So, you pull up last year's employee engagement survey: 85% of employees feel comfortable raising concerns, and 90% believe leadership demonstrates ethical behavior. The numbers are reassuring. But the company you've read about probably had similar results. The real question isn't whether your culture looks good on paper. It's whether you're reading the room, catching both the subtle tensions that statistics might miss and the signals for how to enable your people to succeed, which ultimately drives growth."
"Most companies wouldn't run their operations based on annual customer feedback surveys alone. They track pipeline metrics, conversion rates, and customer interactions in real time, often with sophisticated analytics that account for regional and cultural differences in customer behavior. Yet when it comes to their own people, many leaders still default to annual engagement surveys as their main culture check. A quick look at the culture assessment market shows that the flagship products are still benchmarked survey tools, underscoring this approach as the industry standard."
A major scandal can emerge despite high survey scores, causing reputational harm, profitability decline, and customer backlash. High percentages on annual engagement surveys can create false reassurance because similar firms reported comparable results before failure. Accurate cultural health requires observing everyday behaviors and signals, capturing subtle tensions that static statistics miss. Organizations measure customer metrics in real time with nuanced analytics; people analytics should receive similar, ongoing attention. Benchmark surveys remain common and useful as one input, but they tend to record abstract opinions and provide insights only months after cultural shifts have taken hold.
Read at Fast Company
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