Now You Can Add Measurement to Your Culture Change Strategy

Perhaps the biggest challenge with any attempt to change an organization’s or team’s culture – in other words, how people behave and their attitudes – is measuring whether you succeeded.

That’s really important, because if you don’t change attitudes and behavior, any initiative to increase agility, effectiveness, adaptiveness, engagement – anything that has a behavioral component – will fail to get enough traction to succeed. As Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

The dilemma is that managers are leery of investing in attempts to change attitudes and behavior, because it is so hard to measure success.

We have solved that problem.

Now in Streamline, when you add a Culture Change strategy, you can right-click on it, and select, Create survey-based assessment.

Streamline then takes you to a survey designer, in which an AI assistant will help you to design a short survey that it will automatically administer at intervals over time to samples of people from the parts of the organization that you select.

This is an AI-assisted tool, and unlike so many products that add AI just to have AI, this is a feature where it really is needed.

The AI assistant uses psychometric best practices to create a survey based on the behavioral traits that you want to measure. And to prevent survey fatigue, Streamline only gives the survey to a small random sample of your cohort, at a time interval that you set, for example every month – and a different small random sample each time. The surveys are also short – just long enough to measure the attitudes and behaviors that are your focus. (For statisticians: we measure the internal consistency of the results.)

The surveys ask people for their perceptions about their environment and about the behaviors that seem to predominate – they are designed to elicit honest responses.

You can then go back to the Culture Change strategy and right-click, and select, View Progress. It will display a set of time series graphs, indicating clearly whether there has been improvement in attitudes and behaviors – resulting from your culture change strategy. In other words, you can now measure if your culture change strategies are working.

This is the first and only tool that we know of that directly links culture change strategy with measurement, in an automated way, as part of an overall business strategy. It makes it so easy that you can pivot your strategy and create a new survey, or create additional strategies to change more aspects of culture and measure them too.

The use of an AI assistant is important here, because it enables you to have a discussion about what you are trying to measure. We are using the latest and most powerful model from OpenAI, so you receive deeply informed feedback and the generated survey questions reflect psychometric best practices.

Make sure that you always address culture – behaviors and attitudes – when you create strategies for change within an organization. That’s the way to truly be successful. And make sure that you measure the changes, to show that the strategy is working. That way you have a feedback loop and can fine-tune your strategy.

Now – for the first time – it is convenient to actually measure the impact of any attempt to shift culture, as an integrated component of business strategy!