Culture research - take your time…
Continuous employee listening is valuable for tracking sentiment, but for measuring culture and behaviors, annual research remains the most cost-effective approach.
For the past several years, I’ve been involved in advising on ‘continuous’ employee listening research for a number of large global and UK companies – whether that’s on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. In doing so, I’ve found a really interesting trend.
Survey questions that measure understanding and sentiment (‘I know…’, ‘I feel…’ ‘I believe…’) are acutely sensitive to changes in business performance, environment, strategy and leadership. They can fluctuate significantly from week to week, month to month and quarter to quarter. What leaders and organisations do and say can very quickly impact what employees think and feel. Equally, external or internal events (share price movements, structural or other strategic updates, competitor news and so on) nearly immediately affect employee sentiment.
However, questions around culture and behaviours – what people experience and do - evolve incredibly slowly and are very rarely influenced by what’s happening in the moment.
So what?
More and more businesses are experimenting with forms of continuous listening or more regular research. While this certainly has advantages when it comes to understanding how employees react to change, it is not a very valuable way to measure culture and behaviours.
There are some large ‘reputable’ consultancies who persuade businesses to spend lots of money on continuous culture research. In one case, I’ve seen businesses hand over a million dollars of fees for an consultancy to run ‘daily’ culture tracking research. The words ‘shyster’ and ‘money-down-drain’ come to mind.
The numbers simply don’t move fast enough to merit regular tracking. You get more value from watching paint dry. When focusing limited resources on regular or continuous listening it’s better to track what people think and feel – as these change much more regularly in response to ‘events’.
Annual research (or even once every 18-24 months) is still much more appropriate and cost-effective for tracking slow-moving organisational cultural and behaviours.
So, when designing culture change listening, organisations should resist the urge to measure too often. There is merit in using interim measures on, say, a quarterly basis to deep dive into better understanding specific cultural traits and their drivers or impact. But tracking shifts in behaviour that frequently is simply a waste of time and effort.