Professionals With a Mission: The Importance of Cultural Assessment

Cultural Assessment

A positive workplace culture boosts productivity, collaboration, and employee satisfaction. Despite these benefits, many leaders overlook the importance of culture within their own organization. Company culture isn’t inconsequential; it’s affecting every aspect of your business.

What is a Cultural Assessment?

A cultural assessment is an internal process that helps organizations evaluate their workplace culture. These assessments analyze the implicit and explicit beliefs and attitudes held by the company’s leaders, its associates, and employees. Assessments are taken anonymously.

It’s common for the company’s higher-ups and its employees to view its culture differently. In fact, job postings often lie or exaggerate about their own company culture to attract hires.

Websites like JobSage recognize the importance of company culture and its effect on your employees’ work performance. Every company’s career page says they’re diverse, inclusive, and offer a superb work-life balance. However, many employees come to find this isn’t the case.

Why a Cultural Assessment is Necessary

A cultural assessment can determine why your business is seeing high turnover rates, burnout, and diminishing margins. The following information is backed by statistics from Netsuite.

Poor Organizational Culture Leads to High Turnover

Neither organizations nor employees benefit when the wrong people are hired, but it happens frequently. Whether the employer doesn’t know or care about its own company culture, a poor organizational culture is blamed 50% of the time when an employee quits their job.

Poor Company Culture Leads to Higher Rates of Burnout

Toxic cultures lead to higher rates of burnout. 74% of employees reported job burnout for this reason, while 40% of workers blame it on long work hours and lack of work-life balance. Flight risk is especially high for new employees, Millennials, and Generation Z.

Poor Company Culture Leads to Inaccurate Job Descriptions

Although turnover rates can be improved through better hiring practices, hiring managers aren’t as accurate with job descriptions as they think. 72% of hiring managers feel they provide clear job descriptions, while 36% of candidates report receiving a precise depiction of the job.

For this reason, 66% of workers have accepted a job, realized it was a bad fit, and quit in six months or less. A bad hire costs employers $14,900 on average in productivity and onboarding.

Poor Company Culture Leads to High Costs

Employee turnover is notoriously expensive. The cost of replacing an employee is one-half to two times the employee’s salary. With an average employee turnover rate of 18%, most businesses fork out thousands, even millions of dollars each year replacing and hiring.

How a Cultural Assessment Improves Company Culture

When leaders understand what problems exist in their organization, they can solve them. It’s essential to listen to your employees when they’re discussing your business because they’re providing valuable information on how to make your company more profitable.

By doing a cultural assessment and using it to improve your organization, you’ll benefit from:

  • A strong brand identity.
  • Increases productivity.
  • Decreased turnover.
  • Employee engagement.
  • Attracting top performers.
  • Growing your business.
  • Effective onboarding.
  • A healthier team environment.

Business owners need to learn to communicate well for their company culture to thrive. Be as straightforward as possible with your employees and encourage them to ask questions. If your message isn’t producing the right results, try to be clearer in the future. 

To ensure your employees stay motivated, celebrate their achievements, and listen to their concerns or ideas. Encourage feedback from your employees and offer positive solutions.

Above all, be consistent. Not only will consistency help your employees feel a sense of stability, but it also helps them trust you. Once an organizational structure is in place, maintain its processes at all times. Stay professional and avoid giving preferential treatment. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of The World Financial Review.