Culture Index Survey: Meaning, Types & How To Conduct It

Culture Index Survey: Meaning, Types & How To Conduct It

Company culture is what motivates employees to enjoy their jobs, stay loyal, and recommend the company to their friends and family. Culture index surveys help develop and maintain a positive workplace culture, as well as in increasing employee satisfaction.

A culture index survey is one of the simplest ways to understand how your employees feel about their jobs and the organization.

It enables you to determine whether your organization is providing employees with the resources they need to deliver exceptional results. It also helps you to improve processes for employees and increase their productivity.

What Is the Culture Index?

Employee happiness and customer satisfaction are key factors that determine your company’s profitability. The culture index assesses how your employees perceive their role in your organization, the company culture, and everything else that pertains to their interaction with the company.

Employees who are happy with their jobs are more productive because they are engaged. They recognize that their daily routine determines the organization’s success and are dedicated to its development.

One of the major issues with employee satisfaction is that it is impossible to quantify, and if you don’t figure it out, your organization’s profitability may suffer. It will almost certainly reduce employee retention, which can be a major issue for productivity.

For You: Complete Guide to Measuring Employee Morale (Free Templates + Examples)

What Are Culture Index Surveys?

The culture index survey assesses the factors that influence your employees’ perception of your company. They are questions that help you determine if an employee is satisfied with the organization and how you can make them look forward to being a part of it.

A culture index survey can help managers understand how employees feel about their work environment. The survey evaluates employees’ satisfaction, and attitude, by gathering their feedback to determine what the company’s doing well and what it isn’t.

The data gathered from the culture index survey can be used to improve your company’s policies and culture to boost employee morale and happiness.

Of course, there are other methods for measuring employee attitude, and motivation, such as peer review, manager evaluation, and others.

Benefits of Culture Index Survey

  • Increased Customer Satisfaction

Excellent customer service is one of the most important factors in keeping customers to retain customers. Happy employees tend to provide excellent customer service, which builds loyalty and trust with your customers, resulting in a high customer retention rate.

Customer acquisition also requires a significant investment in terms of increasing product awareness and generating customer interest in your products. As a result, retaining customers is less expensive than constantly acquiring new ones.

  • High Employee Retention Rate

Culture index surveys examine how employees perceive the organization, and the results assist you in developing a better company culture and happier employees. Employees are more likely to stay when a company’s culture is positive, especially when their input is valued.

  • Improved People Experience Processes

The results of the culture index survey reveal how employees perceive the organization. You can use the insights to improve the employee experience throughout the company, from hiring to departure.

  • Strategic Planning

Employees who are engaged are motivated to do their jobs, so they have a positive attitude toward their jobs and are eager to grow and develop within the organization.

So, before you embark on a new path or product launch for your company, conduct a culture index survey to determine whether or not your employees are happy. Find out if they are on the same page with the company’s development strategy and are fully committed to achieving it.

  • Employee Engagement and Productivity

When employees can freely provide feedback and that feedback is used to improve processes, it increases their trust that the organization is looking out for their best interests. 

This affects their attitude toward work and makes them more engaged personally, fosters collaboration across teams, and speeds up processes, resulting in higher productivity and profitability for the company.

So, ensuring your employees are happy and engaged at work isn’t just about having a great work culture; it also significantly increases your company’s profitability.

  • Hiring Culturally Fit Employees

Also, not all technically qualified candidates make good employees, and one major reason for this is work culture. Culture index surveys help you to identify what to expect from each employee in their role, how current employees are meeting these expectations, and why.

Having data on high-performing employees allows you to create a profile for your ideal employee and make decisions based on that.

  • Better Conflict Resolution

A culture index survey can help you identify where employees are having problems with management, customers, and coworkers, and it can also help you devise ways to prevent them from happening again.

When employees are confident that there is a fair way to resolve conflicts, both employees and customers are not agitated, and there is no halt in production or very low employee morale.

How to Conduct a Culture Index Test?

Companies that use an employee cultural index survey to optimize their employee processes tend to have higher productivity, better workforce management, and a lower employee attrition rate. However, all of these great benefits only work when the culture index survey is carried out correctly.

So, here’s a roadmap to creating an efficient culture index survey:

  • Create the Survey Question

The first step in developing an effective culture index survey is to carefully craft the questions so they reflect how employees feel about the organization.

When creating the survey, it’s always a good idea to include HR so you’re working with people who are involved in managing employee experience and can capture the right participant.

  • Deploy the Survey

After developing and finalizing the survey questions, the next step is to distribute the survey to the employees who should participate in the survey.

You don’t even have to survey your entire workforce; you can make your culture index survey private so that only the employees you want to participate in it do.

  • Collect Responses and Analyze the Data

After the survey has been distributed, collect employee responses. You can add a deadline to expedite the process, as well as a date to review the survey results.

The main goal of the culture index survey is to find out what you’re doing right and what you’re not. Take note of what your company is doing well in terms of employee satisfaction and double down on it.

Also, for the gaps that you need to fill, note them down and start looking for ways to eliminate them.

  • Devise a Strategy for a Better Company Culture

When analyzing the results, you’ll find areas in your company culture that need improvement. Don’t just leave it there; devise a solution.

What Are Culture Index Personality Types?

Culture index surveys do not reveal your employee’s personality type; rather, they reveal their attitude and motivation for their jobs. The four major culture index keys used to determine culture index personality are as follows:

  1. Red “A” Dot- Autonomy
  2. Yellow “B” Dot – Social Ability
  3. Blue “C” Dot – Pace
  4. Green “D” Dot- Conformity

Here are the main culture Idex personalities:

1. The Visionary

Visionaries have a high A (Autonomy) but are low on C (pace and D (conformity). They are very focused, high achievers with futuristic goals. 

However, most visionaries are not meticulous or adhere to company rules. They are primarily concerned with meeting targets and accomplishing seemingly impossible goals.

Names for Visionaries: daredevils, enterprisers, trailblazers, architects, and philosophers.

2. Researchers

People in the researcher category have a high D (Conformity) but a low B. (social ability). So they are detail-oriented, they adhere to guidelines, and they ensure that their work is well executed, but they are introverted.

Research patterns: Scholars, Tech experts, specialists, and craftsmen.

3. Organizers

Typically, organizers have a high D (conformity) but a low A. (autonomy). So, they are people who are very dedicated to their tasks and corporate, so they complete the tasks assigned to them quickly and are on track with achieving the company’s goals.

Organizational patterns: Coordinator, administrator, facilitators, and traditionalists.

4. The Socials

Finally, there are the socials, who have high social ability (B) but low conformity (D). They are quite extroverted and able to articulate and communicate their feelings, but, like visionaries, they are not keen on strictly adhering to the rules; they may pick and drop some along the way.

Socials are one the most productive personality types in the workplace because of their high social ability, they can intelligently navigate workplace relationships and culture.

Who are the socials? They are persuaders, rainmakers, debaters, and socializers.

Culture Index Survey Traits Explained

The culture index survey traits help you understand who your employees are and how to boost their morale. The four main criteria that describe the culture index traits are as follows:

1. Motivation – What motivates your employees? It is what motivates employees to complete tasks, meet goals, and generally get things done.

2. Thinking – How does your employee process information and use it to make decisions?

3. Behavior – This is the basis of your employees’ attitude towards their tasks, customers, and colleagues.

4. Interaction – This shows how people interact with others, such as team members, managers, and clients.

So, what are the culture index traits – 

  • Autonomy – It is the ability to make independent decisions and the measure of their proactiveness.
  • Social ability – People can maintain cordial relationships with others and feel at ease in social gatherings.
  • Pace – It’s the amount of urgency people have towards completing a task or an assignment.
  •  Conformity – People’s meticulousness in completing tasks, and their ability to follow rules and regulations
  • Logic – It is the rationality behind a person’s decisions and ideas.
  • Ingenuity – It’s the genuineness of people’s ideas. It also assesses the resourcefulness and imagination of people’s ideas, or their ability to think outside the box.
  • Energy Unit- The energy unit is a measure of how energetic or stamina a person has for getting things done. While this seems close to motivation, not all motivated people have high energy.

Who Is a Culture Index Rainmaker?

Rainmakers are people who have the Midas Touch and can make almost anything extremely profitable. They excel at increasing profits from the ordinary to the most sought-after products.

There are downsides to having rainmakers in your company; they are poor mentors, and they can be difficult to work with and retain as employees because they rarely follow rules. While they can help build a company from the ground up, they can also be devastating to your company culture.

How to Make Use of Cultural Index Survey Results?

The results of the culture index survey can help you identify where your employees are struggling and how you can help them. It allows you to support your employees in ways other than organizing recreational activities to help employees relax or giving incentives to motivate them to meet the company’s goals.

You can also use culture index surveys to determine where your management needs to improve so that employees are more motivated to do their jobs. It could be compensation, activities, development courses, peer reviews, and others.

If you take the feedback from the employee culture index survey seriously and find ways to resolve their issues and properly motivate them, you will increase employee effectiveness, creativity, and loyalty.

Cultural Index Survey Sample Questions

Culture index surveys can help you determine employee engagement, preferences, productivity tools, how they perceive the organization’s management, and job satisfaction.

  • Employee Engagement Questions

These are questions designed to assess the level of employee engagement in your organization. The following are examples of typical employee engagement questions. – 

  • Would you recommend this company to your network?
  • Do you enjoy working for your organization?
  • Are you in sync with management about what’s happening in the organization?
  • Do you look forward to achieving the company’s set targets?
  • Do you have access to tools that make it easy to do your job?
  • Traits Discovery Questions

They help you understand who your employees are and if they are the right fit for the role.

  • How often do you worry about things getting out of control?  (1-5 scale)
  • How is it for you to say no to people when they ask you to do things outside your comfort zone? (Very easy, somewhat easy, neutral, difficult, extremely difficult)
  • Do you feel overwhelmed or stressed?

This measures your employees’ overall satisfaction with their role, management, and the company’s culture.

  • Do you feel your opinions are heard? 
  • Do you feel safe at work? 
  • On a scale of 1-10, how open are we as an organization to feedback?
  • What do you think about the company’s culture? (Excellent, good, average, not good, terrible).

How to Use Formplus for Culture Index Survey

Culture Index surveys and tests can help you find the right candidates to hire and keep them happy. Conducting interviews is inefficient when you have a large team or a remote team.

Using Formplus, you can select pre-built company culture surveys, customize them, and seamlessly distribute them to your workforce. You can also make the forms private so that only employees have access to the surveys.

You can specify a survey closing date so that you can begin reviewing the data on a specific date. The form analytics dashboards provide simple insights that will help you decide what to do to improve your workplace for employees.

Conclusion

Company culture does not emerge overnight or through the organization of fun activities. You must constantly look for areas where you can improve and ask employees how you can make things better for them.

Using culture index surveys can help you figure out how to keep employee morale high and make management effectively help employees achieve the company’s goals.