Hands down my favourite subject was economics. I was fascinated by opportunity cost and those unseen yet powerful forces like Adam Smith’s invisible hand; a metaphor describing a free market economy. Later on I noticed unseen forces alive at work, this time in the context of culture. I was part of both dysfunctional and thriving teams and often team members were unchanged. I wanted to understand how this could be? And if we could experience moments of thriving together, how we could find a way to sustain this ideal? Or at least create the momentum needed to move towards it.
So as many leaders do, I asked my teams the big sweeping question about how they’re feeling at work and combined this with intuition and productivity to predict where culture might sit on a spectrum of terrible to amazing. But this was always a guess influenced by one’s perspective.
And a single perspective is almost always flawed given we see the world as we are and not for what it is, unless you’ve mastered the art of holding many perspectives at once?
In more recent times, as the world increasingly digitizes, we’ve asked teams to convert their responses into a rating using anonymous survey tools. How good is that!?
Leaders and organisations now have the opportunity to use technology to collect feedback which allows for a more objective and accurate view of team culture rather than rely on intuition alone !
Contemporary leaders will love that those previously elusive elements of culture are finally brought into plain sight and quantified. These tools and their results now even feature more prominently in board reporting as well as elevating employer brand and that’s a positive, given how widely culture is talked about in the public arena without any data to back it up. Now you’ve got the data to back it up!
Employee engagement and survey tools have the best of intentions; they simply are not all created equal. Many tools boast multiple functions from allowing you to customise questions and even integrating reward systems. This is great, but make no mistake; the work to achieve and maintain a thriving culture does not come from the tool or a recognition platform,
it comes when leaders and teams take shared responsibility and work together to create change.
The moral of this story? The tool alone is not the answer, it's how leaders are supported to work with their teams and the tool to enact change.
Creating space for team members to have continuous deeper conversations, checking in, sharing new ideas, discussing challenges, celebrating wins and driving actionable change is what will
move the dialler on employee engagement and workplace culture.
Taking action goes a long way towards the pursuit of a thriving culture. The tool is just that, a tool. And whilst it’s now best practice to have a people measure in place; the real gift is feedback and guidance as to where leaders should focus their energy to achieve a thriving workplace culture.
The outcome: a much more inspired workplace.
Assess your workplace culture with our complimentary assessment tool or better still check out our culture tool PQfactor, powered by Teamgage and let us support your journey from good to great.
Contact us today and let's schedule a coffee meeting. suria@peopleq.com.au