Does culture have a $ value ?

Doesculture have a $ value ?

What valuedoes culture have to the organization? 

Can weplace a value on that culture or is culture a soft “thing” that cant bemeasured ?

Over thecourse of the last year interviewing companies in more than 25 countries, theoverarching view from around the world is that culture is of criticalimportance. Most of the companies acknowledged that the idea of having a richand robust culture to some extent defined the success path of the organization.

This leadsto the question of measurement and value.

None ofthem provided a measure of the cultural performance in monetary terms. Thatsaid Gartner research suggested that disengaged employees in the USA costcompanies in excess of $500bn. The implication of disengaged employees is thatin companies with toxic cultures employees are actively disengaged.

Theconverse of that is that there are many organizations where employees (orpotential employees) seek employment there due to the rich and robust culture.The question is then asked about whether people seeking employment wouldwillingly take a lower paying job to work at one of these companies.  Do these employees place a conceptual dollarfigure on the culture and the opportunity to be a part of the culture?

Theconclusion is that potentially culture has a value that may not be directly measurable?How then could we use culture as a KPI (key performance indicator) for managingthe organizational success.

Lead vslag indicators

Mostorganizations use financial KPI’s to measure performance. The challenge withthese measures is that they measure the past. Depending on the time lines of anorganization financial measures will indicate what happened last week, month oryear and in many cases given no indication of the future. These are called lagor lagging indicators.

What if we could have a set on leading indicators of organizational performance. A set of KPIs that are the crystal ball into the future ? 

It wouldbe fantastic to have leading financial indicators, but very few businesses canaccurately predict sales and revenue months or years out, and then it is only aprediction.

However,if we measure culture as a KPI and seek to improve the culture against a self-imposednorm or standard, then it is possible to have a leading indicator of  performance.

We can use culture as one measure of future performance as improvement in the “soft” KPI’s often is a strong indicator for future performance.

This is alead indicator and is one of the tools I use in working we organizations. Wecan measure the gap between an ideal and the actual scale of several non-financialKPI’s. These are all regarded as leading indicators of organizationalperformance.

To applynon-financial KPI’s to your organization as a lead indicators of performance, pleasecontact me to discuss.

RaelBricker is a speaker, consultant and mentor on achieving BUSINESS EXCELLENCE. Theseencompass presentations, workshops and consulting on business excellence,culture, ethics, inspiration, simplifying systems and harnessing growthpotential. 

Rael hasconducted unprecedented GLOBAL research into CULTURE by interviewing 70+companies in more than 25 countries.

If you would like more information, please contact Rael on rael@raelbricker.com or +61408600330

Image courtesy of Shutterstock