B O OK E XC E R PT
HOW TO MEASURE
YOUR CULTURE There are plenty of metrics available to help you gauge how your people are doing. Here are the four that matter. BY JOHNNY C. TAYLOR, JR.
BIG DATA HAS BECOME THE CULTURE WHISPERER OF BUSINESS, telling us every-
Excerpted from Reset: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval (Public Affairs, 2021) by Johnny C. Taylor, Jr. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission.
thing we want to know and much more. Through algorithms, AI and new tools, CEOs have made numbers talk in the same old-fashioned way as picking petals off a daisy. Employees love me, employees love me not. At what point do we stop listening, though? At what moment do too many voices—a cacophony of data points, a slew of spreadsheets, a field of daisy petals—become overwhelming to the senses? To even the most deeply resourced companies, a paralysis by analysis can sink the best intentions around data. GE is a good example of a company that decided to stop measuring for the sake of measuring. They went to a model that only measured what they needed to know in terms of their culture. Selectivity is your sanity. We collect a lot of data designed to give us deeper insights and context. In reality, what ends up happening in a predictive model is you’re trying to forecast behavior X or behavior Y, and you’ve got X-one, X-two and X-three. And X-three is your error term more often than not. Collecting more data is not going to add to the predictability. It’ll add to the error term, which is just noise in the system, right? Too much data becomes a vast light show when all you send are some signals. The right insights are more important than ever. If we are to learn from upheaval, we have to reassess what matters. In life. In business. How do you measure the treasure and discard the trash? These four essential areas will help you measure culture, the important underpinning of your organization: net promoter scores, inclusion factors, curiosity indicators and employer brand. These add up to a Culture Score. We need a way
CEO MAGAZINE / FALL 2021 / 65
