Discover the potential of your organizational culture with the Highberg Culture Scan
Organizational culture is the backbone of any successful business, influencing everything from employee engagement to overall performance. But if culture is so crucial, why leave it to guesswork? Without measurement, improvement is impossible. We help you harness data-driven research to gain valuable insights into your organizational culture, enabling you to create an environment that fosters growth, aligns with your goals, and gets results.
Why should I make my organizational culture measurable?
Research shows that there is a strong relationship between a positive organizational culture and the long-term success of a company. A strong, positive company culture enables employees to feel at their best at the workplace and perform optimally, which are essential elements for long-term success. However, when the culture is not well-aligned with employees and strategy, the opposite effect is observed: employees feel less engaged, leave the organization, and productivity decreases.
In the case of a significant organizational change, these risks are even more pronounced. These changes could be:
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Restructuring
- A shift in strategy
If the culture is not aligned with these changes, it can lead to resistance and challenges in executing tasks. Still, many companies don’t prioritize investing in their culture. This is often because managers view culture as "abstract" or believe that the culture will naturally adapt to changes. Moreover, managers often assume they already have a good sense of the culture, and thus see no need to investigate it. As a result, many organizations make decisions about organizational culture based on assumptions and management intuition, rather than on data and facts. These assumptions about culture can often be misleading, leading to inefficient decisions.
For this reason, Highberg believes in making organizational culture measurable. With a data-driven Culture Scan, you focus on what really matters. You align the culture with your strategy and strengthen both your organization’s performance and employee engagement.
Introduction to the Highberg Culture Scan
Many companies hesitate to measure their culture because it is perceived as a complex process. Effective measurement requires expertise in data analysis, research, organizational culture, and change management, which is difficult to combine within one team. Additionally, culture measurement relies on honest feedback from employees. Concerns about confidentiality, anonymity, and potential negative consequences of sharing their opinions can hinder openness and limit the quality of insights.
At Highberg, we use the Culture Scan to make your organizational culture measurable. With our expertise in People & Culture Analytics and change management, we can provide data-driven insights that organizations can genuinely act on. Privacy and anonymity are top priorities for us, ensuring we create a safe space for employees to share their opinions openly and honestly. This results in reliable insights that organizations can use to strengthen their culture.
But don’t just take our word for it—take a look at some of the many clients we've helped improve their culture with the Highberg Culture Scan.
- Aligning cultures during a government merger through the Culture Scan
Three public safety organizations in the Netherlands decided to merge, bringing many changes for employees. On top of that, there were already significant cultural differences within the organization. For the client, cultural alignment was an essential part of the transition. They chose Highberg because of our experience with quantitative and qualitative methods and our strict adherence to privacy and anonymity protocols, which is of course a high priority for government security organizations.
Highberg used the Culture Scan to map out the similarities and differences between the various cultures and to identify what cultural aspects employees and managers hoped to see after the merger. It was also tested whether the organization was ready for the change process.
The measurement provided valuable insights: there were clear concerns about the transition and the future culture, which were a surprise to the management and transition team, allowing them to better guide the process toward successful integration.
Read the full case study here.
- The Culture Scan was used to support culture change after a major reorganization in the Protestant Church
After a significant reorganization, the Protestant Church was concerned about whether its core values still resonated with employees. Therefore, the organization engaged Highberg to support a culture change with data-driven insights. Highberg first conducted a baseline measurement to assess the current culture, then performed annual culture measurements for three years to track progress.
The initial findings uncovered issues such as bureaucracy and hierarchy, leading to targeted actions like reducing administrative burdens and improving communication. Over time, employee satisfaction increased, especially regarding hierarchy, collaboration, and reduced bureaucracy. Employee engagement scores also rose significantly. The transparent, data-driven approach fostered employee engagement and positivity about the ongoing cultural transformation. Read the full case study here.
- A data-driven culture transformation for an international leader in the agricultural sector
This client is an international leader in the agricultural sector but faced increased competition pressure to grow. A new leadership team was appointed to support the company’s expansion. As part of this, they first wanted to understand the culture within the company and identify the cultural pain points. What cultural values define the company according to employees? What kind of culture do they envision for the future? And is there support for the newly defined core values?
The client had no clear understanding of the company culture or how employees perceived the current leadership. Therefore, Highberg was asked to map the current culture and measure how employees viewed the organization. To date, Highberg has conducted four Culture Scans within the company, each showing progress in employee engagement and increasing alignment with the new core values. To effectively track progress, Highberg developed a dashboard displaying trends of key culture indicators, such as cultural aspects, employee engagement, and support for the core values, all visible at a glance.
What the Highberg Culture Scan does for your organization:
How the Highberg Culture Scan helps me understand my culture
The Highberg Culture Scan maps the culture by engaging with the entire organization. This is done through a combination of surveys and interviews.
- Survey
The survey is distributed to all employees and managers within the organization, allowing us to map both the current and desired culture. We believe it’s important not just to look at the overall culture, but also to analyze the subcultures within the organization. For example, what differences in the culture do employees and managers experience? Are there differences between teams, or maybe between new employees and those with more tenure? We gather information for subgroups as much as possible from the HR system, so the survey can remain concise and to the point, leaving more space for targeted questions about culture. We adhere to our privacy and anonymity policies to ensure that employees are not identifiable to anyone involved in this research.
- Interviews
There are instances where certain results require further investigation. For example, the survey might show a decrease in teamwork, with a specific drop in ratings of communication between departments and knowledge sharing. While this provides a clear direction, it does not explain why collaboration is decreasing. Is it due to unclear processes, a lack of trust between teams, or perhaps work pressure that hampers collaboration? Thanks to our expertise in conducting interviews, Highberg can further explore these questions, providing deeper insights into the culture.
Which topics are covered (in collaboration) in the Culture Scan
Starting with our Culture Scan lays the foundation for transforming your organizational culture
Highberg maps out the key insights regarding the current and desired culture and provides advice on how to develop the culture in a detailed management report. For those who need more detailed information, we offer interactive dashboards that visualize the results. This allows clients to dive deeper into the data and analyze and compare cultural differences between subgroups, such as based on tenure, teams, or departments, etc.
But gaining the insights is just the beginning. Highberg can help you transform your organizational culture. For more information, visit our page on culture development.
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