5 Key Indicators To Measure Truly Human Culture

Whatever you can measure you can improve. Just as you can measure the performance of a product in the market, you can also measure the performance of a Truly Human Culture within a company. When you understand culture as value creation, delivery, and capture, you will understand how easy and necessary it is to measure it.

Truly Human Culture is the way companies create value for their employees, deliver value to their employees, and capture value from their employees.

You can measure the culture at creation, delivery, and/or capture of value. In most cases, once companies agree on a set of values and place it at the reception, they believe they already have a culture. No one cares whether they are following those values or not, all they care about is that they have a set of values.

Enron had integrity as value, yet they continually cooked their books to look profitable. That’s the problem when you define culture as a set of values and beliefs that drives behavior and actions. People carry on without connecting to those values. In real life, the values they are to live by in the workplace are not in harmony with how they live their lives outside the workplace.

Companies need to move from value-based culture to human-centered culture. It's hard to measure values but easier to measure traits that make us human. The design of most value-based cultures is to trigger human behavior. They hardly end up achieving that. How do you go about measuring values like integrity except it results in human behavior?

Truly Human Culture, on the other hand, is not value-based but human-centered. It is centered on what makes us humans and how we can work effectively together with others for a common vision, objective, and cause.

To measure the Truly Human Culture, we identified five key indicators that can be used:

1. Trust: The Foundation of Culture

“Trust is an essential human attribute and virtue. Being both trusting and trustworthy are central to what it means to be a human being.” Bob Chapman

When there is a lack of trust in a workplace people become defensive, gossip, backbiting, suspicious and fearful. They do things to sabotage others and the entire organization in the process. Without trust, the culture isn’t grounded. Companies with trust as value may not foster trust among their people. When people have to be managed, supervised, and monitored, then trust is lacking. The culture will suffer entropy. When the foundation of the culture is faulty, nothing can be built on it.

2. Relationship: The Strength of Culture

“If you believe business is built on relationships, make building them your business.” Scott Stratten

The more meaningful and stronger the relationship between people in the workplace, the stronger the culture will be. Relationships are built on trust. If you have a workplace where everyone is afraid and unsure of what will happen next, people won’t build strong relationships. Relationships will just be superficial. To know whether a culture is strong, measure the relationship among employees and between employees and managers or leaders.

3. Recognition: The Reward of Culture

“People work for money but go the extra mile for recognition, praise and rewards.” Dale Carnegie

People stay where they are appreciated. In the Truly Human Culture, people are not recognized for acting based on the values of the organization but for being human. They are valued for being themselves and for the good, kindness, and humanity they bring to the workplace. People are hungrier to be recognized for the little good they do than to be paid. The ultimate reward they get in the workplace is being recognized. In value-based cultures, people are punished for one bad they do rather than recognized for the 9 goods they do. A company without a recognition program does have a culture that rewards people for being humans.

4. Feelings: The Health of Culture

“Positive feelings come from being honest about yourself and accepting your personality, and physical characteristics, wants and all; and, from belonging to a family that accepts you without question.” Willard Scott

Emotions are powerful. You can measure how healthy your culture feels by how your people feel. In value-based culture, no one cares about how people feel. No matter how they feel, they are expected to keep their values. If they don’t, they are asked to leave because they don’t fit the culture. You can’t separate humans from their emotions. Human emotions reveal a lot about the environment and relationships they are in. Negative emotions about the workplace mean the culture is unhealthy and toxic, while positive emotions mean the culture is healthy.

5. Profit: The Oxygen of Culture

“Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.” James C. Collins

If your company is not being profitable, you should check your business model. Culture always happens to business models. Culture drives and powers the business model. Your culture builds your people, while your business model builds the company by serving the customer. When you have the right culture, your employees will serve the customers right and it will end in profits. Profits are the byproduct of a good culture. There are two kinds of profit: human profit and economic profit. Human profits are when your people become better humans, workers, spouses, parents, and citizens, while economic profit is when your business serves your customers well and makes them happy. If you have economic profit, without human profit, or human profit without economic profit, something is wrong with your culture. Truly Human Culture produces both human profit and economic profit in harmony.