Measuring the health of your organisation’s culture is important but not easy, and to many it may seem like a counter-intuitive task – after all, can you really measure culture?
Yes it is possible, and we would argue necessary, if your aim is to build or sustain a high-performance culture.
Balanced Scorecard
You can usually expect people that work within a high-performance culture are already convinced of its value and are enthusiastic about sustaining it. Good news – because it likely also therefore they are interested in measuring it too.
All sorts of things get measured at work – Key Performance Indicators, skill development, results etc – and all are dependent upon one thing – data or information. Data allows us to track and monitor what ever it is we are looking to measure – and culture is no different.
Our version of a Balanced Scorecard is designed to collect and reflect upon gathered information that relates to a high-performance culture in order to generate a measure of the “Quality and Impact” of our work.
High-Performance Culture: What to measure
It is relatively easy to measure what and how much you do and whether or not it meets service standards. A Balanced Scorecard can take into consideration other measures that reflect the health of your culture. Four important things to measure include:
1. Customer viewpoint: Is what you are doing effective from the customer’s viewpoint and, is it possible to add value by completing activities in less time, by doing them more efficiently? Routinely asking workers such questions leads always to new ideas for refinement and improvement.
2. Perceptions of value:It’s important to measure perceptions about what you do, how useful and valuable it is thought to be and, whether people feel confident in your ability to effect positive change (i.e. impact).
3. Values-based performance:It is vital (though often more difficult) to measure how your work aligns with your service values and how your own, your team’s and your service’s behaviour reflects these. We call this checking your ‘viewing’ (i.e. your beliefs and values) and ‘doing’ (i.e. what you’re actually doing at work and how you do it). Each team and worker needs to consider their own ‘behavioural pledges’ and prioritise time to reflect upon the collective behaviour of the service as well as their individual behaviour.
4. Worker feelings: Importantly you need to consider how your own staff ‘feel’ they are doing and, how the service is doing against its own vision and core purpose. Collecting and listening to worker feelings and perceptions may lead not only to superior solutions but also a stronger culture of trust and openness.