In today’s business environment, understanding and nurturing organisational culture is no longer a ‘nice to have’; it’s a strategic imperative.
Forward thinking business leaders understand the importance of culture and are increasingly seeking third party support to help undertake culture change projects. For these third parties – usually consultants, business coaches, and advisors who help clients with leadership development, HR advisory services, or culture transformation – having the right tools to accurately assess a client’s culture is paramount.
With tools ranging from simple questionnaires and cumbersome employee engagement surveys how do you ensure you’re using the best options to get fast results that help, and not hinder, your client projects?
The Traditional Approach: Employee Engagement Surveys
For many years, the annual employee engagement survey has been a standard response to issues around workplace culture and low morale. These surveys capture high-level sentiment, providing a snapshot of how people feel through scores, charts, and heatmaps. They offer initial insights into employee morale and satisfaction, and are often used by leaders hoping to drive performance and retention.
However, there’s a growing recognition that these traditional surveys often fall short. While useful for capturing overall sentiment, they frequently struggle with core limitations:
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- They don’t uncover root causes: A drop in engagement might be visible, but the underlying reason remains hidden.
- They focus on symptoms, not systems: Insights tend to be vague, like “communication needs improvement,” without clarifying whether the issue stems from trust, clarity, leadership behaviour, or structural inefficiencies.
- They lack actionable direction: Without clear next steps, organisations often resort to generic fixes that miss the mark.
- They’re not always anonymous: By sharing complete answers and full pieces of text from employees, businesses often make educated guesses on who provided certain feedback. Against this backdrop employees aren’t completely honest, as they fear repercussions from being identified by their feedback.
Ultimately, traditional engagement surveys are diagnostic in appearance but not in function; they highlight what is wrong but rarely reveal why or how to fix it.
Beyond Engagement: The Power of Culture Diagnostics
Employee engagement is undoubtedly important, but it’s an outcome, not a strategy. What truly drives engagement – and consequently, performance and business success – is the underlying organisational culture. Strong workplace cultures are consistently linked to better business outcomes, including up to 4x revenue growth, 3x higher shareholder returns, and employees being 3.2x more likely to stay with their organisation.
This is why, to create lasting change for your clients, organisations need more than just data; they need deep insight. While engagement scores show how people feel, a comprehensive culture assessment explains why they feel that way. It highlights the behavioural norms, leadership practices, and core challenges within the organisation that shape employee’s experience of their workplace.
Introducing Cultiv8tiv: A New Era in Culture Assessment
This is where a modern diagnostic tool like Cultiv8tiv offers a new approach for consultants and their clients. Cultiv8tiv isn’t just another engagement survey; it’s an AI-powered culture assessment platform designed to provide precision in understanding workplace culture. It helps you and your clients move beyond surface-level trends to:
- Identify cultural strengths to build upon.
- Reveal hidden weaknesses undermining team cohesion.
- Pinpoint systemic blockers to engagement and productivity.
- Uncover leadership behaviours that influence team performance.
- Understand the root causes behind burnout, friction, and disengagement.
Unlike traditional tools, Cultiv8tiv digs deeper to explain why employees feel a certain way and what specific actions an organisation can take. Its benefits include:
- Simple Setup: You can kick off a culture assessment in less than 20 minutes, configuring it to your client’s needs.
- Completely Customisable: Specify the organisation’s purpose and values, define leadership and management, and decide how you want to analyse the results.
- Truly Anonymous: The AI module removes all identifying aspects from reporting, giving employees the confidence to provide honest feedback.
- Significant Time Savings: The AI completes the analysis, saving consultants an estimated five days for a 200-person organisation from not needing to comb through thousands of responses.
- Actionable Insights: Cultiv8tiv provides results, analysis, insights, and recommendations at speed, more cost-effectively, and with complete objectivity, allowing you to focus on strategic advice and execution.
- Flexible Commitments: You can run assessments as a one-off project, annually, or as a stock check before or after company changes or acquisitions, without long-term commitments.
Every Cultiv8tiv assessment assesses culture across twelve key business areas, including:
- Purposeful Community
- Value-Driven Behaviours
- Leadership
- Management
- Employee Motivation
- Mutual Respect
- Two-Way Engagement
- Challenge and Change
- Workforce Accountability
- Empowered People
- A Foundation of Trust
- Organisational Pulse
This comprehensive breakdown ensures a clear, accurate, and honest review of all factors that make up a client’s culture.
Partnering for Success
Consultants, coaches, and advisors operating in the HR, Leadership, and Culture Transformation spaces choose to partner with Cultiv8tiv because it complements their expertise.
By deploying the Cultiv8tiv platform as a diagnostic, you gain quicker, easier, and more detailed insights, allowing you to focus on providing solutions and driving execution.
For instance, The Culture Formula, a team of experienced HR leaders, uses Cultiv8tiv’s AI-powered assessments to provide data-driven insights, identify development areas, and measure the impact of their transformation efforts for their clients. This base helps them quickly and easily audit client culture before they then undertake their consultancy work to improve this culture.
Your Path to Deeper Understanding
Consultants committed to high performance, data-driven recommendations and good client retention need to shift their focus from mere engagement scores to understanding cultural drivers within client organisations.
Traditional surveys offer trends, but not transformation. Using tools that go deeper, like Cultiv8tiv, you can help your clients move beyond assumptions, uncover the real drivers of engagement, and take meaningful steps toward building a culture that truly fuels growth.
As the saying goes, engagement is an outcome of culture. If you want to improve one, you need to understand the other. To assess your client’s organisational culture with precision and deliver exceptional results, explore how Cultiv8tiv can support your work here.