Making sure your employees are a culture fit, with weighted benchmarking of firm’s offering

According to the Kets de Vries Institute, the organisational culture audit is comprised of 13 core performance indicators. The patented reporting framework has modern usage cases, given that sticky wages are not keeping pace with Consumer Price Inflation (CPI), with services inflation at 5% in August, with the aggregated figure at 3.8%, its highest peak since January 2024.

At Bloomberg, commentator Marcus Ashworth pointed out that the jobs market has seen a decline, with a net loss of 165,000 jobs in the period following Rachel Reeves’ October Budget, with higher employer NI contributions at a lower earnings threshold deterring firms from making new hires.

One of the acknowledged remedies for a shortfall in new hires is to increase employer bargaining power, as a demonstrably productive work culture is a magnet for skilled service workers who are looking for a ‘best fit’ for their in-demand skills set.

Internal training programs can enhance vertical progression within an organisation, or even horizontal traversing the internal divisions where a skills match is found with new vacancies. However, funding and promoting up-skilling is just one way firms can differentiate themselves to potential employees.

A survey published first in 2018-19 by the Kets de Vries Institute looked at the disparity between where organisations believed they stood with regard to the benchmark, and the actual value assigned by the culture auditors. These parameters were stacked and weighted against the total sample percentage of answers to the organisational culture audit questionnaire.

It is interesting to note that 3.80% of respondents stated they put their highest priority on capturing market share; and the same percentage agreed that “We gather information on what our competitors do on a regular basis”.

In fact, the largest discrepancies fell in the parameters of competitiveness, with a 0.71% difference between the level at which it was practised, and how highly it was valued by respondent companies. On the flip side, ‘fun’ was found to be practised at a higher level than the value accorded to it, with a -0.64% variant value.

Entrepreneurship’s actual value assigned was 0.56% lower than the organisations ranked it in terms of importance, and result orientation carried a 0.51% differential.

These are both areas where respondents were aware that clearer guidelines need to be set in assigning R&D capital, registering patents and, where results cannot be accurately quantified in relation to Internal Rate of Investment (IRR), more communication with employees with regards to results expectations and how key performance indicators (KPIs) are assigned and ranked in order of importance.

On the practice questions, 4.13% of respondents agreed that “Obtaining targeted results is a top priority in our organisation”, with the same percentage acknowledging that rewards were strongly performance-based.

Client orientation was another area where the actual benchmark value assigned by the Kets de Vries Institute fell short 0.36% of the value attributed to its importance to respondent companies. In contrast, social responsibility had an actual value assigned which was -0.36% of where it was ranked in order of importance. It is clear that having an up to date Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system which employees can dynamically interact with in making sales and other offers like contracts or services is an area for improvement. A salesforce is only as good as its intel, so to prevent your employees chasing dead leads be sure to perform strategic analysis on target clients.

The sample was categorised according to the responder’s level of seniority, and of their geographical distribution. In terms of the official hierarchy of respondents, they comprised of 5 figures from senior management, representing 33.3% of the sample; 7 figures from middle management, comprising 46.7% of those sampled; and 3 which were TMT forming 20% of the sample surveyed.

Asian company representatives formed 20% of the sample (3 respondents), Europe 26.7% (4 respondents), 3 from the Middle East comprising 20% and 5 from N. America representing 33.3% of the sample surveyed.

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