Most corporate culture surveys are not as effective as they could be. This article will help you to optimize your success and use the results to improve your corporate culture.

Start with Your Goals

When embarking upon a corporate culture survey project, you must start with the end in mind. What is your purpose in doing a corporate culture survey? Do you want to improve the corporate culture? If so, why? What are the main challenges that your company is facing? Do you have a good understanding of what corporate culture is? If not, I encourage you to read Understanding Corporate Culture.

I recommend that you narrow down your goals to three major goals that you would like to accomplish. Examples would include: 1) reduce employee turnover; 2) improve product delivery time; and 3) increase profitability. It is best to set quantitative goals. Even though you cannot quantify your corporate culture, it is the container for all of your results and has a direct and indirect impact on these results. By setting quantitative goals, you will be able to measure the results of your efforts by doing annual or bi-annual corporate culture surveys.

Be prepared to change your goals. While goal-setting up-front is extremely important, you may learn some things about your company and culture that lead you to re-prioritize your goals. This is fine. Be open and flexible. Try not to forecast the outcome of the survey before you get the results.

Designing a Good Corporate Culture Survey

Once you know what you are trying to accomplish in doing a survey, you can design questions around your goals. But, be careful! Quantum physics has demonstrated that the intentions of a scientist affect the outcome of her experiment. That is why I recommend that you use a survey that has been designed by an outside party. Her or she will not share your biases and the results will be less biased.

Below are the sections that we have included in the Culture Builders Corporate Culture Survey:

1. Company Mission
2. Leadership
3. Corporate Culture
4. Company Values
5. The Work Itself
6. Work Assignments
7. Work Fulfillment
8. Individual Career Development
9. Support, Training, and Coaching
10. Summary Questions

You see that the Culture Builders' survey covers a broad range of areas. Corporate Culture is only one section. The reason for this is that culture is the container for actions, decisions, and results. You will be able to learn about your culture indirectly by querying the other areas.

Sections 1-9 are quantitative questions and section 10 has open-ended qualitative questions. The quantitative questions can be tracked by time period, which is important. You will be able to recognize trends and be proactive in avoiding a crisis. The qualitative questions will give you lots of insights and useful anecdotes.

In designing the survey, it is essential to obtain personal information from the survey participants that will help you to segment the data. For example, tenure and department are essential pieces of information. Position level may also be useful.

That said, it is critical to keep the survey confidential. People will be more willing to complete the survey and provide honest answers if they are confident that their answers cannot be traced back to them. Use design and technology to keep the answers confidential.

Implementing the Corporate Culture Survey

Make it as easy as possible for people to complete the survey. Use the technology that makes best sense for your company. I have helped companies set up surveys on their intranets and on Lotus Notes.

Set it up so that someone can begin the survey and the partial answers will be saved if they get interrupted. Make a tight timeframe for people to do the survey