How Often Should You Conduct an Ethical Culture Assessment?
Ethical culture matters to employees, investors, and most of all, stakeholders. Case in point, this year’s Five-Year Ethics Premium is 12.3%. That is how much the publicly listed honorees of the 2024 World’s Most Ethical Companies outperformed a comparable index of global companies from January 2019 to January 2024. The thing that unites those high-performing companies is a terrific culture of ethics.
Such metrics make the case for performing organizational culture assessments to see where a culture’s true strengths and improvement opportunities might be. But since culture assessments are not a once and done thing, how often should you assess your culture?
In this blog post, we will explore why running recurring culture assessments builds immense value for your organization.
Why organizations conduct recurring culture assessments
Culture assessments are a snapshot in time of how your employees feel about different programmatic elements of your culture. Many internal and external factors contribute to that moment, as well as any action plans from of your ethics and compliance department that might be underway. That is why it is important to measure culture periodically to see how you are improving long-term.
The Department of Justice’s recent ECCP Update includes language around how and how often organizations measure ethical culture. The key is measuring how your actions are affecting ethical culture over time, as well as what external factors that might affect your ethical culture. Also, you want to be able to compare those results year over year, ideally, every two years. 96% of World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees, for example, do some sort of ethical culture survey at least every two years, and 49% measure their culture at least yearly.
Key considerations for culture & cadence
When setting up a cultural assessment cadence, look at your corporate calendar to see what other things are going on in the organization (particularly things like other surveys). Those come to mind first. That’s a thing that a lot of organizations look at.
Also, consider if you have a busy season or a slow season for when the best time for a culture survey might be. Conducting a survey when the organization is undergoing a big change—such as changes in senior leadership or key training—tends to take employees’ attention away from your survey.
Avoiding major holidays is a good idea, but for global organizations, this may not be possible. Likewise, try to avoid times when many employees might be on vacation (such as August, for European employees).
The key thing to remember is that there probably is not a perfect time to conduct your culture assessment, but it is still important to conduct them even if you can’t find a perfectly quiet time in your corporate calendar.
Supporting initiatives
Culture surveys are a great foundational effort to collect a lot of data and feedback on how your employees are feeling about the elements of your program. But they also provide opportunities to collect qualitative data through other measurement efforts.
As you decide when to do your main ethical culture survey, think about some of the questions the survey data may raise that you may wish to examine further. As you schedule your culture assessment, planning additional efforts like site visits, management interviews, and focus groups can help better understand your main culture survey results.
Post-survey communications
Most organizations experience survey fatigue. This doesn’t necessarily mean that employees are tired of taking surveys, however. Rather, they are tired of taking surveys where nothing happens based on their feedback. 76% of World’s Most Ethical Companies honorees communicate their culture survey results to all people leaders. They are really the tide that raises all ships. If your managers talk with their teams about some of the opportunities or key things that came from the survey, especially as you begin to implement action plans, those plans will be much more impactful.
Throughout the year, it is important to tie those actions back to the feedback from your culture survey. Let employees know you have taken action and implemented their feedback. The cadence of such communication depends on how many messages employees receive from the organization, but the key is to regularly tie your action plan to survey results so that people don’t feel like their voices fell on deaf ears.
To learn more about how strong ethical cultures improve business performance, visit the Ethisphere Resource Center for free policy examples, best practices reports, interviews, and more.
And to request a culture assessment demo for your organization, please visit the Ethisphere Culture page.
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