Identifying issues hindering organisational performance
Conducting a cultural assessment of a business requires a structured approach to uncover the root causes of dysfunction, misalignment, or inefficiencies… both for the business as it is now, and for a business looking to grow sustainably for the future.
The goal is to identify underlying issues in leadership, communication, values, and employee engagement that may be hindering performance or growth. It also gives organisations the chance to think about their cultural offering, and how scalable this might be in the future.
For example, a SME with 60 employees might offer an incredibly robust, generous and attractive benefits package to its colleagues… it might be a massive reason for people coming to work there. But if the company grows to 500 people, is it still sustainable? What might the long-term impacts be of continuing to pay them, or worst still, having to remove them completely?
By conducting a comprehensive cultural assessment, businesses can move beyond surface-level problems and implement meaningful, long-term improvements to foster a more engaged, productive, and high-performing work environment.
Typical approach to conducting a cultural assessment
- 1Gather data (both qualitative and quantitative) to assess the status quo. This might be either through evaluating existing employee survey results or conducting new anonymous surveys, paired with observation and interviews to gather further insights.
- 2
Assess leadership and communication styles to evaluate how leaders set expectations, provide feedback, and make decisions. This helps us to identify whether communication is transparent, consistent, and inclusive or if there are silos and misalignment.
- 3
Review core values to evaluate cultural alignment, comparing the stated company values with the behaviours and norms in the workplace.
- 4
Examine dynamics and relationships to identify collaboration, conflict resolution, and team cohesion. Here we want to assess how diversity, equity, and inclusion are practiced and perceived (in every sense).
- 5
Explore people metrics, reviewing turnover rates, absenteeism, and employee engagement scores. We can also use our proprietary Good Boss Questionnaire tool to add further detail to this section, which can support ongoing development.
- 6
Complete a root cause analysis and recommend actions, identifying key pain points affecting culture and performance. We work with leadership to create a roadmap for change, including measurable goals, training, and ongoing culture initiatives that address communication gaps, leadership development, team engagement, and structural misalignments.
Why choose People Business for your psychometric and ability testing needs?
Specifically focusing on attraction, one of the things that differentiates People Business is our insistence that anyone completing a psychometric profile should have a debrief with us. Personality profiles in particular are very good at identifying our trends, but might not show up where we have coping mechanisms or mitigation strategies.
When working with our clients, we therefore insist upon a one-hour interview with candidates to question the themes that we identify in our assessment. We then feed back to our clients using not only the assessment report, but our gleanings and suggestions on what they might like to probe in further interview stages.
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