What if you could dashboard what was driving your culture on one page?

During my 20 plus years of client work, I've witnessed time-and-again how challenging it is to create a cohesive narrative of what drives people's behaviour at work.

It’s a multifaceted concept that varies from individual to individual.

Further complicating matters is that many people lack a clear understanding of culture.

They often view it as an intangible force that impacts the business, rather than a result of the environment we cultivate.

A meta-analysis in 2023 looked at culture change research and summarised the challenge perfectly: the vast majority of effort has been around creating models to describe culture (there are literally hundreds of them).

It showed that almost no research has been conducted to codify what influences culture or to shed light on the most effective strategies for change.

This trend makes it really difficult to get our stakeholders out of passive observer mode.

In our culture audits, if we follow the traditional approach - we are able to describe how authentic or empowering we are to perfection.... BUT that is where we get stuck because understanding what it is like, doesn't help us know (or explain) why or help us to identify what to do next.

Even as a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, doing this as my ‘day job’ for over twenty years, I often left Executive engagement sessions bemused.

Without a way to view the factors driving culture beside each other in one report/page - it was all too easy for people to focus on what other groups needed to change rather than considering what was in their gift to influence directly.

With so many factors floating about to influence, I hate how overwhelmed my clients can become. And relying on me to show them the wood from the trees and build dependency never really sat well with me.

So, when building The Employee Experience Project methodology, my first step was to write a list of pain points that more traditional change approaches used in the past struggled to answer.

As I built our methodology, it acted as my NorthStar, allowing me to check tools & techniques that would overcome the things I'd seen black success in the past.

Feedback from our clients and training delegates suggests that one of the most powerful tools we built was the Culture Catalyst Scorecard CCSQ ?.

It was designed to allow our clients to evaluate their current organisational ecosystem against its ability to encourage and enable the behaviours needed to define your ideal culture.

Our clients say it is powerful for a few reasons:

1. It is based on a thematic analysis of 50 + culture studies completed over the last 20 years, meaning we've captured the things most commonly flagged as critical influences on culture.
2. It helps more planning-stakeholder engagement conversations past vague assertions 'to be more empowered' to supporting practical actions designed to influence the whole eco-systems more it more likely to come true. For example, using the CCSQ to plan a goal of creating empowerment we would look across the dashboard to see what aligned and what didn't, then look at:

• Leaders - attitudes, motivation, and skill.
• Managers and colleagues: role re-contracting and task realignment development so they are capable of taking on more responsibility.
• System + processes at governance, budget sign-off + delegated authority lines to ensure our base processes won't frustrate personal efforts to drive change.

3. It helps you hook key stakeholders without considering how they need to drive change personally rather than supporting their ability to observe and expect others to make the changes. It allows you to provide meaning without critical stakeholders getting distracted from their own role in change by what others need to do. This gives you what you need to be able to pull their attention back while acknowledging that action is needed elsewhere.

So, however, you do it, think about how you can map your ecosystem on a page; if you want a starting point, you can access more information on the CCSQ form or download it here.