Culture Performance Indicators: Your Key to KPI Growth

This article originally appeared in The Data & Measurement Issue of Performance Matters magazine. Download a digital copy of the magazine to read more on this topic. 

Suppose I asked you, “Could your organization achieve its goals without a healthy culture?” You’d say, “Of course not.”

Suppose I then asked, “How do you know if your organization’s culture is helping or hurting your business performance?” You might say, “Well, I have a hunch.”

Without exception, organizational culture is either a bridge or a barrier to performance. It is never neutral. Sustained strategic growth necessitates healthy and high-performing cultures. This much we know, both intuitively and from longstanding research showing positive impacts on KPIs like retention, productivity, and profitability.

Your organization probably has a wealth of data on culture performance indicators, or CPIs—maybe so much that you don’t know what to do with all of it. Of course, CPI data is most valuable when it helps you and your leadership team make decisions that translate into real business outcomes. The key is linking your culture data to your KPIs.

Connecting CPIs to business outcomes helps leaders understand which two or three aspects of the organization’s culture most influence the organization’s business performance. With this information, leaders can decide where to spend limited time, attention, and resources, and take unified action to influence culture over time. Doing this regularly can help leaders anticipate and address barriers to company growth and performance.

What are CPIs and why are they considered “culture data”?

CPIs quantify the degree to which the behaviors, symbols, and systems in an organization support a healthy and high-performing work environment. Examples of CPIs include trust in leadership, cross-team collaboration, autonomy, psychological safety, transparent communication, employee well-being, growth and development, and pride in working at the organization, among many others.

In our work with clients, we’ve seen a few success factors when linking culture and performance data:

1. Foundationally, your leadership team must share a vision of your organization’s strategy and the KPIs connected to it, as well as the desired impact of culture on business performance. Data will eventually guide you, but you must first chart the purpose-driven, strategically targeted course.
2. CPI data are not just for HR, and KPI data are not just for business unit leaders and the C-suite. Linked CPI and KPI data are the key to your success! Throwing elbows won’t help anyone here. Instead, make sure that combined data is in the hands of enterprise-wide decision-makers, change agents, and managers who can drive sustainable, widespread change.
3. Regular and recurrent CPI and KPI measurement are key. Measuring infrequently is like checking the temperature once a year. Business performance and culture are ever-changing and dynamic, just like people and the weather. With repeated measurement on a regular schedule, you will live in the all-powerful world of trends, deeper insights, and greater cultural impact on KPIs.
4. Gathering culture data from employees necessitates sharing it back with them, along with a commitment to the areas that leaders plan to take action. At this point, follow-through becomes critical. And that means, again, that your enterprise-wide decision-makers, change agents, and managers are working together on priorities to drive sustainable, wide-spread cultural performance.

Your organization’s culture data may be the most underutilized map to your strategic growth ascent. And you have the power to build that map with your data.

The potential impact of culture data is significant. One of our clients decreased their attrition KPI by 47% in one year by focusing on CPIs related to psychological safety, leadership transparency, and building respect and dignity at work—three areas that culture data, both quantitative and qualitative, showed needed significant improvement. Leaders were aligned, directed resources, and acted in unison on these three areas to make meaningful impact.

By connecting CPIs to business outcomes, what used to be a hunch about the impact of your organization’s culture on business performance can now be a data-driven investment.

Want to start putting your culture to work? Click here to learn more about the culture performance matrix and get in touch with a member of our team.