Do you know how your staff really feels about you, or wonder what you can do to retain great staff and attract new employees? There’s now a simple way to measure that!
You may have a feeling or opinion about what your employees think of you, but what you see or think might not align with the feelings of your team. By having clear data, you can be proactive in your recruitment and retention.
Your culture should be like a magnet: it gets people to line up at your door and makes them want to stay and grow with your organization.
How Data Helped Ryan Change His Culture
You cannot fix what you are not willing to expose, and this organization was ready to find out!
Ryan, the second-generation owner of a manufacturing plant, knew something was not right. On the surface, his employees seemed to be in pleasant moods and productive levels were good. However, his company saw consistent turnover, and he sensed friction between him and some of his senior staff.
As Ryan soon learned, culture is a combination of observable behaviors, and not what he could see written on the walls. Consistent behavior shows up in actions, and usually comes from the top and transcends through the organization.
Great intentions don’t always equal positive impacts in how others perceive your actions and how you make them feel.
Research on the science of emotions shows that pleasant feelings increase engagement, while unpleasant feelings narrow and limit us, which decreases engagement and makes us more close-minded. This same study also directly links emotions to performance, showing how positive or negative thoughts can be the reason an employee quits—or stays with—a company.
Through Genos International, which specializes in the assessment and development of emotional intelligence in the workplace, we now have the technology to easily measure this.
Measuring the Pulse of the Floor
When helping people like Ryan, I like to ask “do you know the pulse of your floor?”
The tool is called the Emotional Culture Index, and as you can see in the photo below, it measures 10 different emotions. By having it measured in three different states, it allows you to more easily understand how to make informed decision to improve your culture.
In addition to this quantitative data, we also receive qualitive data with two free text questions:
- What feeling is most helpful to you, and what causes you to experience this feeling at work?
- What feeling is the most unhelpful to you, and what causes you to experience this feeling at work?
You can customize the survey by area, demographics, and even replace feeling words to connect with the language of your organization. It is anonymous for the raters, and takes about 5 minutes to fill out!
This information was game changing for Ryan, as you can see from the graph. He knew that in the age of AI and automation, being and feeling human is what makes each person in an organization unique.
He shared this meeting with the team and got further insights into why they were feeling disorganized and stressed, and what they needed to feel more informed. As a result, he was able to laser focus on what his team needed to have the greatest impact. Based on where the labour market is today, this information has been fundamental in growth and cadence of Ryan’s company.
While Ryan already had great intentions, having this data and knowing the “pulse of the floor” made everything clear for him. This new information put him in a position where he now has the edge on his competitors, and he and his team are more aligned, like one heartbeat pulsing all together. When problems do arise, Ryan is now able to better understand his employee’s concerns and react quickly to retain his employees.
Find the Pulse of YOUR Floor
If you are not deliberately managing your culture, then you get what you get. Would you like to have the opportunity to feel the pulse of your floor to discover precisely what is driving your operation, decisions, behaviors and ultimately results in your organization?
Contact Trevor for a complimentary survey and have the opportunity to discuss privately the findings and your opportunities to keep your employees from becoming someone else’s.
Written by Trevor Blondeel, copyright July 2021.