Organizational Culture Surveys and Climate Assessments

Humanitarian aid groups conduct Culture Surveys and Climate Assessments to get reliable information on how their culture supports or detracts from achieving their stated mission, vision and goals. Such surveys attempt to look at the entire organization at once, to see where its actions are focused and effective and where it has weak points that need immediately attention.

As consultants on such matters, we support organizations in conducting these surveys and counsel them so they can come to understand the crucial issues they are facing. We also work with them to find a way to undertake the culture changes they need to make if they want to achieve their best performance.

The survey process is this:

• A client nominates several people from all parts and levels of the organization who know it well and can report their observations reflectively.
  
  
• The designated people complete an extensive survey instrument that asks their opinion about how they would rate their organization on 8 to 20 dimensions of organizational life. Typical organizational dimensions chosen include the quality of its leadership, teamwork, management skill, communication, information flow and morale.
  
  
• The rating is done on a numeric scale, which is collected, averaged and plotted on a graph.
  
  
• This produces a powerful visual image of exactly where the group’s assets and liabilities are. This picture typically provides a convincing rationale for the organization’s next growth efforts.

Organizations value these surveys, because the instruments used have been carefully constructed and thoroughly field-tested. The results are seen as empirically reliable. They can also be compared to results achieved by other groups. If a group scores a 3 on a 10-point scale in the dimension of Leadership, for example, when most groups score a 7, the group knows immediately it has a serious problem to address.

The surveys not only reveal a lot about the organization on the dimensions being measured, but they usually reveal even more about the types of issues that produced the statistical picture in the first place. What also begins to be revealed are places in the group where supervision is weak, conflicts fester, meetings are ineffective, hidden agendas frustrate work and so on. This provides the grounding for organizational development efforts that people can quickly agree on, support and implement.

We help some clients enrich the results they get from these surveys with focus groups and individual interviews fueled by the initial results.

Ultimately, we help clients present all this information to their senior leadership team, so the leadership can fully understand the issues they face and what they need to do to produce the new organizational culture they are planning to put in place.