17 Organizational Culture Survey Questions To Ask
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” – Peter Drucker.
Because your organization’s culture has such a profound impact on success, you must stay in touch with how employees perceive it.
An organizational culture survey is a powerful tool for addressing a crucial aspect of your organization’s success: its culture. Just as different people groups express distinctive cultures, organizations reflect intrinsic beliefs, norms, and behaviors that influence decision-making and create a particular atmosphere.
When employees respond well to an organizational culture, it encourages collaboration and innovation to propel the company forward. On the other hand, an organizational culture that employees find discouraging can hinder success.
Organizational culture surveys tell the story of what’s going on in your workplace culture. This article covers what organizational culture surveys have to offer, provides 17 example questions to ask your employees, and recommends some best practices for administering and making the best use of them.
Contents
Why measure organizational culture?
17 organizational culture survey questions to ask
Checklist: How to conduct an organizational culture survey
Organizational culture survey: Top tips for analyzing the results
The HR facts
According to Gallup’s client results, organizations with strong cultures improve their performance in the following key areas:
- Employee engagement: 50-point increase over three years
- Net profit: 85% increase over five years
- Workforce growth: 25% increase over three years
- Patronage: 138% improvement over five years.
Why measure organizational culture?
The type of culture an organization offers can work to either its benefit or detriment. A cohesive, supportive culture creates trust, camaraderie, and belonging and unites employees with organizational goals and each other. It’s also a catalyst for attracting and retaining highly talented employees who are engaged and productive.
In fact, 92% of the 3,000 participants in an EY U.S. survey stated that company culture is a top factor in whether they stay with an employer.
A Gallup poll showed that only 21% of respondents strongly agreed with feeling connected to their organization’s culture.
However, those that do feel connected are:
- 3.7 times as likely to be engaged in their jobs
- 68% less likely to often feel burned out at work
- 55% less likely to be on the lookout for a new position
- 5.2 times as likely to strongly recommend their employer to others.
Since healthy, resilient cultures support better business success, every organization must stay abreast of how its current culture resonates with employees. Measuring organizational culture is the key to this.
The benefits of conducting an organizational culture survey
While there are other ways to gauge corporate culture, a survey can help get data directly from employees to make informed HR and business decisions.
Conducting organizational culture surveys offers many advantages, including the following:
- Identifying the current culture and establishing benchmarks for future assessments
- Being aware of what employees appreciate about the culture
- Identifying issues and practices that undermine the culture
- Fostering transparency and communication with employees
- Demonstrating a commitment to valuing employee input
- Empowering changes that drive improvements.
17 organizational culture survey questions to ask
Employee feedback is essential when evaluating organizational culture. To understand employees’ authentic perceptions of your culture, you need to ask questions that will extract the right information.
Following are 17 sample organizational culture survey questions, with explanations of how they relate to assessing workplace culture.
1. Is the organization’s mission and vision clear to you?
Organizational culture should match up with what the company claims to be about. If employees are unclear about the organization’s mission and vision, they can’t live them out as expected.
2. Do you see the impact of your duties on achieving organizational goals?
Employees who can see the value of their contributions will feel aligned with the organization and form a more connected culture.
3. How effective is overall communication throughout the organization?
When employees feel informed about what’s happening, there is greater transparency and less employee frustration in the work environment.
HR tip
In-depth (20+ questions) company culture surveys should generally be conducted at least once a year. Shorter pulse surveys can be useful to send out a few times per year. These can help to understand the impact of significant organizational changes, measure cultural improvement initiatives, and help allocate resources.
4. Is there transparency in how high-level decisions are made?
When employees understand the reasons for changes and new procedures, it reduces misinformation and negative speculation that can circulate throughout the workplace.
5. Are the organization’s ethics and compliance policies clearly defined and carried out?
A lack of ethics or inconsistencies in practicing them can lead to mistrust and problematic behaviors.
6. Does the organization provide a safe working environment for all employees?
It’s difficult to cultivate a positive organizational culture if employees feel unsafe or like they have to be overly cautious.
HR tip
Inform employees that their survey responses are confidential. You must guarantee anonymity for employees to feel safe sharing the kind of candid feedback you need from them.
7. Does the organization honor and promote Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging?
DEIB statements and policies are easy to implement, but employees will sense if they’re just lip service.
8. Does the organization support employee wellbeing and work-life balance?
When employees feel valued as human beings, not just workers, it creates a nurturing environment where they can thrive.
9. Does your manager empower you to make decisions?
A sense of autonomy allows employees to take more pride in their work and realize they can make an impact.
HR tip
Ask executive leaders to participate in the survey as well. Consider isolating their results and comparing them to the overall results. This will reveal any disconnect between how leadership and the rest of the workforce interpret culture.
10. Do you feel free to voice your ideas and opinions on work matters?
When employees can speak freely, they feel heard and entrusted with bringing solutions to the conversation.
11. Can you voice concerns without fear of repercussion?
If employees know they’ll suffer consequences for speaking up, they’ll tend to ignore problems or tolerate difficult situations. Small struggles will fester into crises that create a contentious environment, leading to worse business outcomes.
12. Do you feel encouraged to originate and experiment with creative ideas?
In a healthy organizational culture, employees know they can try new ways of doing things, even if they don’t always succeed.
HR tip
Anticipate any obstacles employees might face in completing the survey. For example, will they have enough allotted time for it? Will the survey load and be easy to complete on their devices?
13. Is the onboarding process effective in helping new employees settle into the workplace?
New hires get their first real taste of company culture during onboarding. They will feel valued and appreciated if they are welcomed and well-prepared to start their roles.
14. Are conflicts and interpersonal issues addressed and resolved effectively?
Tension among employees can be picked up by everyone they interact with and can spread throughout the workplace. Addressing these situations promptly prevents them from becoming a tolerated norm.
15. Are enough opportunities provided for continuous learning and acquiring new skills?
An organization’s commitment to long-term employee investing demonstrates a culture of growth and development.
HR tip
No survey can cover everything, so allow employees the chance to offer more input. Include a section where employees can share additional comments or suggest other questions they’d like to see on the survey.
16. What do you like best about our company’s culture?
Hearing directly from employees about your strong cultural points will reveal what you should be reinforcing.
17. How could the organizational culture be improved?
Every employee will value different aspects of organizational culture. However, uncovering the most common priorities will help you spot emerging problems and focus on the most meaningful areas.
Checklist: How to conduct an organizational culture survey
An effective organizational culture survey questionnaire is intentional. It’s important to consider the factors that will help you engage employees and capture the right information.
Here are six steps to guide you through the process of executing an organizational culture survey:
- ✓ Identify the objectives: Determine the purpose of the survey. In other words, why do you want to gather this information from employees? Do you want to affirm the overall culture’s strengths and weaknesses? Are you trying to assess whether the culture is affecting employee engagement? Maybe you want to see how well the culture reflects the company’s core values. Once you decide on the end goal, you’ll be able to design the survey specifically with this in mind.
- ✓ Collaborate with stakeholders: Getting stakeholder input on the survey structure and topics will generate diverse perspectives to ensure the survey is comprehensive and relevant to the entire organization. Key stakeholders to engage with may include executives, team leaders, other HR team members, and employee representatives.
- ✓ Choose the survey delivery method: The right survey delivery method is crucial to getting maximum participation and optimal results. A user-friendly online platform streamlines the process by providing easy access and simplifying data collection and analysis. If you have deskless employees with varying degrees of access to digital tools, be sure to incorporate alternative formats.
Make the survey as concise as possible. Reveal the number of questions upfront so employees know what to expect. A progress bar displayed throughout the survey may keep respondents on task. - ✓ Choose question types and craft the wording: Several question formats are commonly used in culture surveys. For example, multiple-choice, yes/no rank order, opinion scale, Likert scale, and open-ended short answer. Using a combination of types will gather different types of data, break up the monotony of the survey, and give respondents more options for expressing their opinions.
Ensure that each question is worded to be clear, concise, and focused on relevant feedback. Avoid biased wording that prompts the desired response. (i.e., “How amazing is our relaxed work environment?”) Use straightforward language and avoid HR or other kinds of jargon that some employees won’t be familiar with. - ✓ Conduct a pilot survey: Before officially launching the survey, do a trial run with a small number of employees from various departments. They can describe what it was like to take it and reveal any problems with the survey format, question comprehension, or response options.
- ✓ Implement the survey: At this point, the survey should be ready to release. Here are a few tips for a successful roll-out:
- Promote the survey within all applicable communication channels
- Provide the link to the survey and share how long it will take them to complete
- Communicate the purpose of posing employee questions about culture
- Explain why employee input is so valuable and how it will be used
- Describe what types of actions or initiatives may come about from the survey results and how this will affect employees.
Organizational culture survey: Top tips for analyzing the results
How to make the most of your survey results
- Analyze survey responses: Use a spreadsheet or the survey platform to organize and sort through the data. The quantitative data from numerical or scaled responses makes it quick to deduce the lowest and highest scoring areas.
- Integrate open-ended response information: This unstructured quantitative data is time-consuming to analyze but can hold beneficial insights. Sorting it into categories such as positive, negative, and neutral sentiment makes it more manageable. AI tools and software solutions are also available to simplify this task.
- Identify patterns and trends: Look for common themes in the data. Identify which areas stand out as strong or weak. Notice whether patterns are visible across different teams and if some have a more unified impression of the organizational culture than others.
- Develop an action plan: Once you have a grasp on the current state of your organizational culture and which factors stand out as problematic, determine the highest priority issue(s) to address. Create an action plan for targeted initiatives. Set specific goals, establish timelines, identify key stakeholders, and assign ownership.
- Communicate results and plans to employees: Share the survey findings with the entire staff. Use visual elements such as charts and graphics to show and explain the data in a more relatable way. Describe what is being planned to enhance the workplace culture. Let employees know their feedback is valued and directly impacts upcoming improvements and initiatives.
Key takeaway
Organizations shape their cultures both intentionally and unknowingly. Unfortunately, leaders aren’t always in touch with the nuances of how employees experience culture.
HR can help bridge this gap by conducting an organizational culture survey and exploring the data it yields. Once you understand what your employees think works well, and what doesn’t, you’ll be equipped to strategize and act on what will enrich the culture and support organizational achievement.
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