What your culture average is hiding

Written by Amy Billings from &Evolve 

It is the time of year when many Birmingham businesses are looking back at their people survey results and starting to plan for next year. A headline figure lands in the board pack. Engagement is up a point, or down a point, and the conversation moves on.

That single number is useful. It is also a compromise. An average blends very different experiences into one tidy figure, and in doing so, it can describe almost nobody.

If one part of a business rates something a 6 out of 7 and another rates it a 3, the average is 4.5. A perfectly reasonable score. Nothing to raise at the next leadership meeting. Except that no one in the building actually experiences a 4.5.

Where you sit shapes what you see

The first thing an average tends to hide is the distance between the people reading the results and the people living them.

Global benchmark data from Perceptyx shows a clear gradient: 87 per cent of executives are confident in their company’s vision, compared with 78 per cent of managers and 73 per cent of individual contributors. The further someone sits from where the work happens, the better the culture looks.

&Evolve’s ten-year Culture Diagnostic, drawn from over 800 employees across six sectors and close to 8,800 individual comments, found the same pattern. Where leaders, managers and colleagues answered the same questions, leaders scored higher on ten of twelve.

That is not anyone being dishonest. Leaders see the organisation through plans, reports and the conversations that reach them. Colleagues see it through the rota, the system that crashes and the handover that did not happen. Both views are real. Only one of them usually makes it onto the slide.

When strengths and struggles cancel each other out

The second thing an average hides is where the problem actually lives.

Across the diagnostic, people consistently rated what was close to them highly. “My team works well together and I understand my role” averaged 5.5 out of 7. “I am trusted to make decisions” sat at 5.0.

The picture changed as soon as the questions looked beyond the immediate team. Cooperation across departments fell to 3.2. Bureaucracy getting in the way of productivity scored 3.0. Whether the organisation responds proactively to change dropped to 2.9.

The strengths are local. The weaknesses are organisational. Blend them into one figure and a strong team score props up a weak systemic one. The result looks broadly fine, and the friction disappears into the arithmetic.

This data was not the voice of one unhappy group. The diagnostic deliberately sampled engaged and disengaged colleagues in equal measure, chosen at random, and the pattern held for both.

Goodwill can disguise the cost

So why do people rate their own team so much more positively than the wider business? In almost every organisation &Evolve has worked with, the answer is the same: people are the glue.

“Supportive” was the most frequently coded theme across the entire dataset. Colleagues cover for one another, take pride in their work and describe each other as the reason they stay. As one frontline colleague in the care sector put it: “The staff are like family, and we look after the people we serve as if they were our own.”

But that care often exists despite the conditions around it, not because of them. Silos, mixed messages, workload and bureaucracy recurred in almost identical form across sectors as different as manufacturing, engineering, higher education and residential care.

Uncomfortably when people quietly compensate for a system that is not working, their goodwill can keep the headline number looking healthy. The average does not show what that effort is costing them, or how long it can last.

From listening to visible action

There is one more thing an average hides and that is whether anyone believes the survey will change anything.

“No action taken on feedback” recurred widely across the diagnostic. People notice the gap between being asked for their views and seeing anything move, and each time it happens, they become a little less likely to speak up next time.

The good news is that closing that gap does not require a large programme or a large budget, which matters for the many small and medium-sized businesses across the region. It starts with three habits. Break results down by level, team and location rather than reading the headline alone. Read the comments alongside the scores, because ratings tell you how strongly people feel and their own words tell you why. And report back quickly and honestly on what was heard, what will change and what will not, and why.

Momentum rarely comes from a grand culture initiative. It comes from people seeing, perhaps for the first time in a while, that what they said actually moved something.

A question to sit with

Before celebrating or worrying about this year’s headline figure, it is worth asking a simpler question first: what might our organisational average be hiding?

Which teams, sites or levels sit well below it? Where are people quietly holding things together for the business? And if leaders and the front line answered the same question, how far apart would their answers be?

No business can improve a reality it cannot see. The good news is that, in most organisations, the care is already there. The work is in looking clearly enough to find where it is being stretched, and acting on what is found.

&Evolve’s ten-year white paper, The Culture Leaders Cannot See, sets out the full findings, which can be found in the white paper section of our website.