Culture is intangible, yet its impact can be observed and felt. Creating the right culture is a unique challenge for management teams. Cultural change is often the most difficult part of the transformation for organisations seeking to become more adaptive and innovative. Innovation necessitates new behaviours from leaders and employees that are frequently at odds with corporate cultures that have traditionally been focused on operational excellence and efficiency. A combination of regulatory, financial, and social challenges is driving the current emphasis on corporate culture, with organisations increasingly focusing their efforts to ensure their culture reflects their purpose and values and delivers on their strategy.

Challenges of Measuring Culture
Despite these increasing demands, attempts to assess culture to the point where it can be managed as effectively as other strategic levers have frequently resulted in minimal success. The standard method entails triangulating a number of lagging indicators. While they can be easily captured on a dashboard, they are not typically designed for the task and frequently overlook the fact that this is a complex system with multiple inputs and outcomes. Researchers who rely on participant self-report methods for data collection face the challenge of designing questionnaires in such a way that respondents are more likely to answer honestly. These processes, however, frequently fail to account for response bias. This refers to an individual’s predisposition to provide inaccurate or false answers to self-report questions. Simply put, employees give the answers they believe the organisation wants to hear.

Sentiment data or analysis, which is the automated interpretation and classification of emotions (typically positive, negative, or neutral), can be used to determine how an individual felt the day before. It does not, however, predict what an employee will do tomorrow. While combining sentiment data with qualitative insights and key outcomes improves the picture, it frequently adds more complexity and reliance on assumptions. Although qualitative content analysis is widely used in research, drawing firm conclusions from it are harder. There is an ongoing need for an effective strategy for conducting a corporate culture analysis.

The Role of Behaviour
Behaviours are the most visible manifestations of culture — behaviour drives culture, and culture reinforces behaviours. Developing a framework that can describe and compare individual and organisational behaviour is critical. Organisational behaviour is the study of how individuals, groups, and teams work within organisations and how organisations operate as a whole. It is vital that managerial staff learn about human behaviour, how to improve interpersonal skills, and how to manage relationships with others at work.

Organisational behaviour encompasses all other social sciences and disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and organisational theories. Organisational behaviour as a result can be approached in several ways. As people are the most valuable resource in any organisation, the Human Resources approach encourages and supports employee growth and development. Creativity and fulfilment are also encouraged and supported. According to the Contingency approach, different managerial behaviours are required for effectiveness in different environments.

A Results-oriented approach focuses on the outcomes of organisational behaviour programmes that are assessed in terms of their effectiveness. Finally, according to a Systems approach, all parts of an organisation interact in a complex relationship. This approach takes a broad view of individuals and examines issues in terms of overall situations, considering as many factors as possible that influence employee behaviour. The key to cracking the culture code is to shift the focus from measurement to understanding the relationship between the individual and the organisation.

Corporate Culture is a Completely Controllable Competitive Advantage
As the new year approaches, company culture will remain a priority for businesses. In order to strive for a better place to work, new and smarter methods for measuring and gaining a clearer picture of its current culture will be critical. A better customer experience is also a result of improved culture. Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first. A great company has a great culture that focuses on attracting and retaining the best people, nurturing a creative environment, and assisting in the discovery of new ways to innovate.