Beyond Traditional Surveys: Creative Ways to Measure Your Company Culture

Understanding and measuring company culture is essential for creating a positive and thriving workplace environment. Traditionally, organizations have relied on surveys to gather insights into their company culture. However, these surveys can be time-consuming, may suffer from response bias, and often provide delayed and static data. Fortunately, with advancements in AI technology, it is now possible to measure company culture in real-time, without relying on traditional surveys. TruPulse, an AI platform that combines HR technology and workplace psychology, offers innovative ways to measure and track company culture using the tools you already use, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack. In this blog, we will explore alternative methods to measure company culture without traditional surveys.

Where to Get the Data

If we are not going to run surveys or hire expensive consultants to interview employees, where are we going to get information to measure company culture? While it is important for HR teams to monitor culture from the standpoint of logging employee concerns and complaints to HR, that metric is going to be purely anecdotal and not representative of a large company with thousands of interactions between employees every day. If only there was a way to analyze those interactions to understand the true company culture. Well, there is! The primary way we interact with each other in modern companies is through the chat messages we exchange every day. Chat has replaced phone calls, meetings, and emails as the primary way we interact. If you want to understand company culture, you have to analyze company communications. Concerned about privacy? Don’t worry, TruPulse de-identifies all communications before it analyzes culture so companies can get group, departmental or demographic level insights but individuals cannot be individually identified.

Employee Feedback Through Chat Interactions

Rather than relying on traditional surveys where the results come from what employees want to tell you, TruPulse offers a continuous feedback loop by analyzing employee feedback and interactions within the chat platforms the company employs. By analyzing employees' thoughts, concerns, and suggestions, organizations can gain real-time insights into the cultural aspects that impact employee experience. Since all communications are de-identified, the company gets the value of honest feedback without imposing on employee privacy or forcing employees to answer surveys. This fosters an open and safe environment for employees’ opinions to be shared, resulting in more authentic and actionable feedback.

What Aspect of Culture Can Be Measured?

There are four major aspects of culture that should be measured to understand a company’s culture.

Company Morale Analysis

One important way to measure company culture is by understanding employee morale. With traditional tools, companies will make a yearly survey of morale and assume that it is how the employees always feel. With TruPulse, companies can have an automatic and continuous gauge of employee morale so HR leaders will always have a sense of the cultural health of the organization. 

Trending Topic Analysis

What are the top trending topics on the minds of your employees? Most HR teams don’t really know. While some of these topics will be the normal everyday issues of getting the job done, many will also be related to the company culture. By seeing a real-time list of topics that are trending in the workforce, HR teams can always understand if cultural problems are emerging in the organization so appropriate action can be taking to improve the employee experience. 

Cultural Norm Analysis

Every company has certain cultural goals and expectations for the behavior it wants to promote to have a culturally and socially inclusive environment where all employees can feel comfortable. For some companies, it may be as simple as expecting employees to not use profanity when communicating with each other. For others, it can be a focus on encouraging more positive and less toxic communication between employees. A whole host of behaviors can be uncovered including racism, sexism, cultural insensitivity, or disrespect for different lifestyles. TruPulse can provide reports on how companies are doing in these types of categories. Want to know if the DEI training worked? How about any of the other cultural training programs? Just look at the reports in TruPulse and you can see how trends in the company are heading.

Sentiment & Emotional Analysis 

When it comes to how to measure culture, the latest trend in HR is to move past simple facts, lists, and numerical data points and to implement a deeper analysis of employee sentiment and emotions. New AI-based natural language processing technology now allows HR teams to automatically understand not only what employees are saying but also what they are feeling. Understanding the Positive vs Negative sentiment of a specific topic is critical to understanding company culture. Wouldn’t it be valuable to know what percentage of your employees have a positive view of the Work From Home policy now compared to 3 months ago? Understanding the emotional breakdown on a topic can also be important to understanding the company culture. How did employees react to the new pay raises for the year? What percentage were happy, sad, frustrated, or angry? By analyzing communications, TruPulse provides real-time insights into the prevailing culture and allows organizations to address emerging issues promptly.

Conclusion

Measuring company culture without traditional surveys is now possible with innovative AI platforms like TruPulse. By measuring company morale, trending topics, and cultural issues, and using advanced tools like sentiment analysis and emotional analysis, organizations can gain real-time and actionable insights into their company culture. TruPulse's integration with communication tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack allows for continuous and automatic analysis, enabling organizations to make data-driven decisions that enhance employee experience, engagement, and overall workplace culture. By de-identifying data before it is analyzed, TruPulse allows companies to get the group, department, or demographic-based breakdowns of culture while protecting employee privacy. Embrace the power of AI technology to measure and shape your company culture, moving beyond traditional surveys and unlocking a deeper understanding of what drives success within your organization.