Assess Your Company Culture: The 4 Key Areas

Should You Assess Your Company Culture?
If your organization isn’t performing at its peak — or if you’re navigating shifts in strategy, leadership, or workforce composition — it’s time to take a hard look at your company culture. Understanding your current culture is critical to aligning your people with your business goals.

Every Company Has a Culture
Just as individuals have personalities shaped by traits, habits, and tendencies, every organization has a culture that defines how it thinks, feels, and operates. Some people are naturally outgoing and collaborative, while others are more reserved or skeptical. Similarly, some organizations thrive on innovation and risk-taking, while others prioritize structure and caution.

Corporate culture is the invisible framework guiding how work gets done. It shapes decision-making, collaboration, communication, and even the behaviors rewarded or discouraged. It’s reflected most clearly in leadership — how leaders make decisions, who they choose to hire, fire, and promote, and which values they consistently champion. In short, culture is not just what a company says it believes; it’s what it does every day.

Workplace Culture Matters
No longer just a nice-to-have, corporate culture has become integral to a company’s success. When your culture aligns with your business strategy and when you hire talent that fits with your desired culture, you will outperform your peers.  In fact,

• Recent research from Harvard Business School found that an effective culture can be the reason for up to half of the difference in performance between organizations in the same business.
• Our own organizational alignment research found that cultural factors account for 40% of the difference between high and low performance in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

How to Assess Your Company Culture
If corporate culture drives performance, then understanding and measuring corporate culture is essential. Only by assessing it can you determine whether your organization is truly positioned to compete effectively in the marketplace. To evaluate the health and effectiveness of your culture, consider four key dimensions that lend themselves to meaningful measurement:

1. How Aligned Are Your Strategic Drivers?
   The foundation of every company strategy is the alignment of its vision, mission, and values. We call these three components “strategic drivers.”
   • • Vision
       We define vision as what the company hopes to become – the business it will be in tomorrow.  Effective vision statements focus on unique, inspiring, challenging, motivating, and memorable future possibilities.
     • Mission
       Powerful mission statements lay out the organization’s business and fundamental purpose in a manner that is short, believable, relevant and achievable.
     • Values
       Meaningful corporate values describe your fundamental beliefs that guide your most important decisions and actions.

   If you want to get a sense of your corporate culture, start by determining if employees understand, believe in, and are committed to your vision, mission and values. If there are gaps, there will also be holes in the culture you are trying to create.

2. How Well Do Employees Communicate within and Across Teams?
   Our alignment research pinpointed information flow and transparency as one of the top five factors in creating higher performance.  An open culture is distinguished by the ease and flow of moving ideas and suggestions from one employee to the one who can evaluate and implement them.  Check to see that there are no barriers to formal and informal channels of communication and a culture of collaboration.

   Are your employees be able to send, receive, and understand information and innovative thoughts freely?

3. How Agile Are You When Change Is Needed?
   Market responsiveness was the most influential alignment factor and change agility, how well leaders and employees respond to key changes required to remain competitive, as the third most important cultural factor for high growth companies.  Stay on top of what is happening on the front lines. Seek feedback from employees on what they observe of the competition so you are not caught flatfooted when you need to make shifts in product mix, sales approach, or resource allocation.

   How change ready are your employees?

4. How Accountable Are Employees for Their Performance?
   Every employee should clearly understand what is expected of them in their job and how their success and failure will be measured — accountability. Then it is up to management to see that performance standards are clear, transparent, fair, timely, accurate, and maintained.

   For those who excel, see that suitable recognition and rewards are given.  And by the same token, for employees who perform below expectations, see that there are consequences. When performance accountability is high, people know where they stand, are clear about where they need to go and know what they need to avoid.

   Do your people know where they stand?

The Bottom Line
A strong, well-defined culture drives performance and shapes sustainable success. The ability to regularly assess your company culture — and tracking how it evolves — ensures your organization stays aligned, resilient, and positioned to outperform the competition.

if you want to see if your culture is aligned with your strategy, download How to Align Your Culture to Drive Your Strategy Forward