How to assess your culture in support of your Equity, Diversity and Inclusion strategy
When looking to advance your Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy and develop more inclusive behaviours across your organisation, focusing on long term culture change is critical. When it comes to organisational change initiatives, culture trumps everything.
Organisations should be setting objectives about having diversity at all levels in their workforce – but this is half the story. To create long term, sustainable change you need to build an inclusive culture that will support diversity targets and objectives over many years, not just months. Our latest whitepaper on ‘Creating Inclusive Culture’ explores this topic in more detail.
But shifting culture is notoriously difficult. We believe it must start with an assessment of where you are currently at, so that you are able to map your journey forward.
Below, we outline some of the watchouts for organisations and how to capture information that can effectively assess your current culture.
Common mistakes when assessing culture
The first thing that organisations will often get wrong is to assess their culture on their own without any external help. It is possible to do this, but a big risk with this approach is bias in looking for what you already believe to be true. Bringing in objective, external support can help you uncover the implicit reality of what your culture stands for.
Another challenge, and one often faced by organisations carrying it out themselves, is that culture is so big and broad that it’s hard to know where to look to find something useful. Often the task feels so big that it’s a difficult to know where to start and how to draw meaningful insights.
Finally, the biggest mistake made is not actually identifying where the opportunities to influence culture are. Even when working with third party partners to assess culture, organisations can get drawn in by frameworks, theories or metaphors to bring culture to life, when in reality, simply describing the culture doesn’t actually indicate how to shift culture. It’s critical that the link is made between the findings and how an organisation can influence its culture.
The importance of engaging the right stakeholders
For any culture assessment to be successful you need to engage the right stakeholders to do two things - define what you’re looking to achieve and provide the insights into how the current culture contributes to success.
Defining what you’re trying to achieve with your culture assessment
The most successful change has to be driven by the highest leaders. It’s critical that the executive leadership is engaged and supportive of the culture change work that is being undertaken. By engaging this group early and getting the direction clear, it will set the project up for success.
Providing insights into the culture
Once the objectives are defined, you need to identify how you are going to gather insights to assess an organisations culture. The amount of information available is vast, and it is important to gather a sample from every different population that is attached to the organisation. This would include staff at all levels, volunteers, customers, and suppliers to name a few. Ensuring inclusion of representative segments of the population is key. As is asking the right questions about how culture ‘shows up’ in organisation successes and in failures.
Wherever possible, talking to and engaging with these groups qualitatively through observation and discussion will provide the best insight, but if it isn’t possible to gather data in this way, then there will be a wealth of other information available such as complaint reports, satisfaction surveys, exit data, published information about pay and policies that provide insight into the culture.
How to capture the right information
Once the stakeholders and the data points are identified it is important that the data being collected is organised in a way that you will be able to draw conclusions from and propose interventions. We approach this by looking through an inclusion lens at information across six domains:
Motivation
Understanding why people want to work in your organisation.
Ways of working
Exploring how individuals and teams work together.
Power structures
Determining who has control over decision making in your organisation.
Adaptability
Identifying how people respond to change and mistakes.
Interactions
Looking at how your people engage with each other across all levels.
People
Looking at how representative your people are at all levels.
By focusing on these domains, it creates a story of what is happening within an organisation and helps us to understand the areas that need to be influenced in order to create a more inclusive culture.
Strong foundations will set your culture change up for success
Culture change is hard. And if you don’t set your organisation up for success by getting culture assessment and objectives correct from the start then it will be difficult to influence culture further down the line.
Engage your stakeholders early, ensuring there is leadership buy in who have accountability and appetite to follow through on it.
Make sure you structure the information you are collecting into clear themes that can be communicated back to the organisation.
And most importantly of all, ensure that this culture assessment provides actionable opportunities to influence your culture to become more inclusive.
To find out more about how to shift your culture to be more inclusive read our latest whitepaper on the topic.
