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Want to know if the common behaviour at your organisation matches its value and strategy?

You need Culture Audit!

What is a Culture Audit?

Every well-performing employer should closely monitor the culture of their organisation. They need to make sure the work environment they provide for employees is of good quality, there are programmes or schemes put in place to support the development of staff members and that the current culture of the business brings the desired results.

Assessment of those key components of an organisational culture can be complete in a culture audit. The results from the audit will lead to ideas of how to introduce positive changes to improve or strengthen the current company culture and also outline the most appropriate features, which need to be adopted, to ensure faster goal accomplishment.

To put it in simple terms, the culture of an organisation is what defines its unique identity. It unveils the true values, attitudes, norms and behavioural patterns, exhibited by the employees. It also shows how staff responds to internal and external pressure factors. Understanding your own organisational culture will give you a better picture of the most and least effective ways of achieving your objectives.

A culture audit is also known as culture survey, cultural alignment survey or climate survey. By definition, a culture audit helps employers assess the prevalent behaviour in the organisation and whether or how well it fits in the overall value system and outlined goals of that organisation. It acts as a starting point in determining requirements for potential employees who want to join the company. Frequent culture audits benefit employers in many ways. They provide insights on what makes employees stay in the organisation for a longer period of time. In addition, helps prospective talents decide if the given company is the right place for them. The audit examines the Employee Engagement levels and analyses what impact the organisational behaviour has on them.

Why do you need a Culture Audit?

If you want your employees to feel appreciated and important, doing a culture audit is a brilliant way of showing them that. It will give you the opportunity to dip into the current state of your organisation and ultimately enhance the Employee Engagement. Examining the present values and practices inside a company plays a key role of determining how to alter its future direction. The culture audit is the beginning of building a strategy for improvement or maintenance of the organisational state. It provides a clear insight on all company strengths and weaknesses, so that action plans for further development are created and put in place.

The most common driver for running a culture audit is the need of change or alignment with a new vision. Employers who distribute such surveys get to understand how their employees feel after a merger, change in management or an organisational structure update. It is the best way to measure the level of involvement and commitment to the company’s values. Culture audits paint a comprehensive picture of various aspects in an organisation, such as how well vision and mission are understood, how management is seen, how satisfied with salary and benefits employees are, how staff sees business results, innovation and teamwork, and what are the cultural differences between groups in the company.

Don’t delay your culture audit. Make sure you are in line with everything that’s happening inside your organisation through the eyes of the people who work for you.

How to run a Culture Audit

Culture audit surveys are generally not short. Usually they examine a number of areas they may contain up to 70 questions, especially if detailed and deeper evaluation is needed. After the results are analysed, they are presented to the executive management board in a clean and clear manner. In some cases the outcome of the survey becomes the first step to creating an action plan for the managers.

When you run a culture audit, you can rate different people in your organisation and the practices they follow in various areas like hiring, listening, speaking, sharing, inspiring, developing, appreciating and celebrating. All this information can be gathered by distributing a detailed questionnaire, carefully crafted by your human resources department.

Having your staff completing a written survey like that is how you create a clear image of your organisational culture. An important thing to consider when creating or selecting a survey is the information gathered during a culture walk or culture interviews. It is certainly a good idea to run an employee survey annually in order to always have a relevant snapshot of employee beliefs and feelings about your company in different periods of time.

Culture audit and employee surveys can be purchased ready or have a bespoke design. In the first instance you will get many interesting and professional questions that are commonly asked in various organisations, making them reliable and validated. The downfall of this, however, is that not all of them would be relevant to your own company, which is why a growing number of employers choose to have their surveys customly designed. In big organisation, specifically, employee surveys are the only way for a good and extensive culture assessment.

Why do you need bravoSURVEYS Culture Audit survey

bravoSURVEYS culture audit surveys have been carefully crafted to include a wide range of questions covering different aspects of an organisational culture and applicable to various industries. In addition, we can create a bespoke survey that is exclusively tailored to your company and business to maximise the impact of the results.

Like in all bravoSURVEYS products, the culture audit survey takes into consideration your needs and requirements to create a comprehensive online questionnaire. The survey is very easy to use from both the surveyor and the surveyees. All results will be presented neatly in a dashboard, along with other benefits and insightful pointers for decision making in the organisation.

Have we sold you on this? If you need more persuasion, click here to try a demo yourself.

Øyvind's avatar
Øyvind Forsbak
CTO
As CTO and co-founder of Orient Software, Øyvind Forsbak oversees all of our organization’s technical matters. Since Orient Software's founding in 2005, Øyvind has guided the company's choices of technology to become a world class developer in .NET and modern JavaScript frameworks.
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