Frequently Asked Questions about the Cultural Health Indicator™
1. Why is it called the CHI? And what does it actually measure?
3. What makes EMERGE International different?
4. What are the benefits of doing the CHI?
5. Why do I have to pay attention to Culture?
6. When should my organization consider using the CHI?
7. What is EMERGE International's philosophy about employee opinion surveys?
8. Why was the Cultural Health Indicator™ developed?
9. How does the Cultural Health Indicator™ work?
10. How can I gain a further understanding of the CHI?
11. What type of information do I receive?
12. What are the theories that support the Cultural Health Indicator™?
13. What does my organization get when it is all over?
14. Can my organization learn how to adminster the CHI?
15. Why should we choose EMERGE International?
1. Why it's called the CHI, and what it actually measures.
Chi as defined in eastern cultures, is known as the life force within us. The Cultural Health Indicator™ (CHI) is appropriately named the CHI since it clearly defines the life force of an organization's culture. The Cultural Health Indicator™ (part of our registered process called Cultural Due Diligence™) measures elements that help you determine: employee engagement, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, leadership effectiveness, productivity levels and clarity of your strategic focus. It also helps you to determine the most efficient and cost effective approach for utilizing resources for creating a healthy and positive culture.
Cultural Dimensions Examined by the Cultural Health Indicator™ (CHI):
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Leadership |
Vision, mission, values |
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Relationships |
Trust |
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Communication |
Feedback |
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Infrastructure |
Formal procedures |
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Involvement & Decision Making |
Authority levels |
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Change Management |
Creativity and innovation |
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Finance |
Perception of financial health and the role of the employee |
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Cultural Descriptors |
We have a list of predetermined values. This list can be customized to reflect your own organization’s values as well. |
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General Climate |
Three open-ended questions that capture the stories and suggestions from employees. We can include additional questions focused on specific areas you would like to target. |
Why do we measure these (cultural) dimensions? 75% of all change initiatives fail within the first three years [not meeting strategic and financial goals]. The culprit? Lack of attention to environmental/cultural issues. Also, through extensive research and empirical data we have found that when businesses are not clear about their strategies, practices, policies, processes, behaviors and expected outcomes there is chaos.
Chaos and uncertainty can severely hamper your ability to achieve your organizational goals and can jeopardize your ability to implement long lasting change strategies.
Many of the top research houses have found that the best indicator of overall excellence in a company's ability to attract, energize and retain talent to improve the bottom line is achieved by developing a healthy/positive organizational culture. Organizations today are operating in environments that require different approaches, different ways of thinking and different structures.
Organizational change demands a 'new way of life', a revolution or reinvention. As a result different opinions and views from the workforce must be solicited and acted upon. Also, both leadership and operational management will require new understanding, new skills and new behaviors. The data collected from our process will provide you with the critical data you require to achieve these goals.
2. The "Right Culture."
Some insist that all organizations have a different culture and that no one set of cultural characteristics is more "right" than others. They are absolutely correct when they are referring to cultural characteristics.
Cultural characteristics are things like: assumptions, norms, history, stories, rituals, customs, etc. These are the things that make each of our organizations unique, and no one culture from this perspective is any more "right" than the other.
However, we have found there are certain homogeneous cultural elements in highly successful organizations. These factors are more about values than organizational characteristics and are the elements we measure.
Homegeneous Cultural Elements
TRUST
The key element that is typically absent in most organizations is trust. As described here, lack of trust is a symptom and results from not being honest and consistent in your actions as a leader. When your employees see that you are sincere and congruent in what you say and do then they begin to trust you but not before this occurs. Without trust, honest communication becomes a self-canceling oxymoron and stated goals like empowering people and pushing authority downward in the organization fall far short of the mark.
AUTHENTICITY AND CONGRUENCE
Successful companies have more than a set of core organizational values that are printed and distributed to the work force. More importantly, their core organizational values are evident in their daily activities. Leaders in these organizations tell the truth!
SOCIABILITY AND SOLIDARITY
Your culture must strike a balance between the self-interests of individuals and the needs of your organization.
AN OPEN ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE:
- Removes the bureaucratic nonsense. All bureaucracy does is create barriers, not clarity.
- Employees work in collaboration with one another. It doesn't matter at what level.
- People share honest information, quickly disseminating ideas throughout the organization and pulling teams together quickly to do something with the new knowledge.
- Encourages entrepreneurship.
- All levels share in the decision-making process; and, hold each other accountable for his or her actions.
INNOVATION
Healthy cultures view learning as an ongoing process, where people share knowledge, and provide the right tools.
They advocate risk-taking and reward it.
They also encourage people to constantly challenge the process and take steps to create something new; and invite conflict.
Innovative organizations see conflict as a very positive and creative process.
CUSTOMER IS #1 FOCUS
Studies show it is much easier to keep an existing customer then to regain the confidence of a lost customer or to attract new customers. It has been proven that sales to existing customers are more profitable then to new customers. Many leaders today are recognizing that establishing long-term relationships is the best way to ensure the long-term profitability they seek. The customer [next to the employee] has come to the top of the ‘to do’ list. In addition to being employee centric many are becoming customer centric and deeply fathoming what that means.
A culture that can be proud of its customer relationships is one that fosters good service. Its employees tend to do more for the customer and are more attentive to the opportunities to build on that relationship. Such a culture encourages its people to remain with the company longer, thereby positively impacting its retention factor There may be several reasons why this kind of culture is generated: trust, open and honest communication, friendly work atmosphere, and fairness are but a few.
3. What makes EMERGE International different.
Cultural assessment and development is our core competency. We have developed a process that is not only reliable but has also been validated. We challenge the status quo when it comes to cultural assessments.
The CHI:
- Replaces the need to conduct your traditional employee satisfaction survey.
- Is user friendly - we have a high desire to engage you in learning our process - so you can conduct the assessment on your own if you so choose.
- Looks at the soft and hard business issues and takes longitudinal data and creates links.
- Determines alignment. Do you have all the right elements to change your marketing strategy, create teams, etc?
- Integrates results from the survey into a post survey action plan that provides you with very specific steps to improve operations.
- Identifies where you need to focus your resources and energy.
- Allows you to see specific results that will have an immediate impact on your business; therefore, buy-in of the process is immediate.
- Does not use jargon - we call it what it is.
- Helps you gain insight into the destructive and constructive behaviors within your business.
- Gets at the heart of the issues and points of healthiness - we do an MRI vs. an X-ray.
- Goes right to the core of any successful/healthy culture and measures the level of trust, fear, and bureaucracy in your organization.
- Focuses on - the relationship between an organization's people and its business and organizational processes to ensure successful attainment of organizational goals.
4. The benefits to you.
- Increased management collaboration and teamwork.
- Improved decision-making capabilities.
- Improved employee retention and attraction.
- Increased commitment to attain strategic initiatives.
- Improved customer service levels.
- Enhanced leadership and managerial effectiveness.
- Increased shareholder value.
- Improved communication.
- Improved partnering across the organization.
- Commitment to a shared future vision.
- Improved competitive advantage.
- Improved productivity levels.
- Enhanced/more efficient operational processes.
Our Commitment
Our goal is to support leaders and their employees in taking their organizations to the highest level of excellence by ensuring the software (the people) is aligned with the hardware (structure, policies, procedures, financial goals, systems, communication, etc.)
5. Why paying attention to culture matters.
Researchers have found that there is a direct relationship between the organization's culture - mission, involvement, consistency, adaptability, etc. -and profitability, return on investment, employee retention, customer satisfaction and productivity.
Many research houses like the Hay Group and Gallup have found that the best indicator of overall excellence in a company's ability to attract, energize and retain talent is a positive organizational culture.
6. When your organization should consider using the CHI™.
To determine that ask yourself if you are facing any of these challenges:
- Defining your culture.
- Hiring the right people - finding the right people.
- Retaining your intellectual capital.
- Identifying which processes and systems are inefficient and costing you money.
- Keeping employees focused and energized.
- Delivering superior products and services.
- Creating a higher trust level among employees.
- Maintaining a profitable business.
- Facing a potential merger or acquisition.
- Staying ahead of your competition.
- Declaring yourself 'employer of choice'.
- Increasing shareholder ROI.
- Developing effective leaders.
- Have conducted employee opinion surveys in the past and been disappointed in the results.
If you answered yes to any of these challenges, then you should seriously consider utilizing the Cultural Health Indicator™ (CHI) in your organization. There is no 'magic bullet' but the CHI can:
- Provide you with a compelling business case for change.
- Enhance your efforts to achieve sustainable change.
- Help you implement change initiatives that stick.
- Improve your bottom line.
7. EMERGE International's philosophy about employee opinion surveys, and what should be included.
We believe that traditional employee opinion surveys do not get at the real business issues. To know if your workforce is satisfied or dissatisfied is not enough. You must ask yourself the question - why are my employees satisfied or dissatisfied? Why are my indicators high or low?
Measuring the satisfaction levels of benefits is not enough and to measure morale is foolhardy - morale is not a thing, it cannot be measured. Why morale is high or low is an outcome of how a business is structured and how it operates (your culture).
When constructing the survey here are the things that must be considered and are included in the Cultural Health Indicator™. Employee opinion surveys should:
- Be developed in such a way that the True Cultural Elements are being collected and measured.
- Provide clarity for leadership as well as for the entire workforce.
- Focus on the governing principles, formal organizational procedures and systems, informal practices, environmental factors, organizational characteristics, and organizational values that frame the direction and actions of your organization.
- Serve as a baseline marker for the "current life" of the organization.
- Go below the surface and understand the behaviors that are occurring that are helping or hindering your organization's ability to achieve its business/financial goals.
- Determine how employees understand the vision, mission, and organizational values.
- Contain statements that suggest balance, alignment, consistency, lack of trauma and peace. Terms such as trust, clear, understood by all, protect, reliable, clear communication should be used to speak to the "calm" within an organization.
- Be connected. All sections of the survey must be connected and no compartmentalization should occur and a holistic look at the connections must occur.
- Capture stories, histories, assumptions, customs, rituals and language. These factors play a very important part in employee satisfaction levels.
- Identify status of structure, planning, technology and people valuation by the organization.
- Identify the sub-cultural issues of conflict, communication, decision-making, and how the organization applies these issues of decisions to the formal procedures.
- Examine disorganization, flexibility, resolved and unresolved conflicts; self-regulation and self-direction, which are essential to the creation of a healthy work environment and a healthy performance of the work.
- Define the ability of the organization to identify the gaps and connectivity that exist in their performance and thinking.
- Have a goal of creating SATISFACTION PARAMETERS.
- Focus on the trust and empowerment factors for employees.
- Seek to indentify the best practices within the organization to celebrate and duplicate.
8. Why the Cultural Health Indicator™ was developed.
The Cultural Health Indicator™ was developed to provide organizations with a clearer understanding of its effectiveness and focuses on the need for identifying organizational balance and alignment.
The process of alignment and balance is what we term congruence. Theoretically, management and organizational philosophies have focused on the critical changes necessary to enhance organizational formal systems, governing principles, and operational processes.
The focus of these philosophies has been one-sided. The forgotten side has been the human component of the organization. When dysfunction or frustration begins to develop, it is the human component that is most impacted, (based on research studies) misunderstood, discounted or forgotten. This instrument therefore looks at the health of an organization based on its balance and alignment of people and systems.
We have found that our approach provides a comprehensive and enlightening process of discovery for our clients in 'plain' English. It allows the opportunity for people and organizational systems to grow within the limits of the organization's capacity to explore its own history and process, for movement from one place in its history to another.
Our process is not laden with jargon but is presented in terms that can be understood by all levels within the organization. We do not put organizations in boxes; but, rather, provide a true picture of the current state of the business and logical solutions for improvement.
The instrument was also developed in the hopes of helping leaders improve the sobering failure rate of M&A activities by understanding organizational culture and the immediate need to combine the "human systems."
9. How the Cultural Health Indicator™ works.
The Cultural Health Indicator™ can be administered by paper and pencil or it can be completed via the Internet. The Internet surveys generate unique personal passwords in just one click. The survey takes approximately 25 minutes to complete and all results are sent directly to EMERGE International.
This process ensures a high level of confidentiality and reliability. Every survey is customized to include open-ended questions to help organizations get at additional areas of concern. The information can be sorted in numerous ways by: departments, divisions, job titles, levels (managers, supervisors, etc.), physical locations, etc.
In the case of a merger or acquisition it will assess and compare the cultures of Company A to Company B, and identify the synergies in these organizations as well as uncover potential "landmines" of difference.
The Cultural Health Indicator™ has been translated in both English, Spanish and German. We have the capability of developing surveys and reporting results in other languages.
Analysis, our experience has prepared us to be flexible, agile and accurate in our assessment of many different survey tools and creation of findings reports. We have had experience with comparing an organization's prior assessment data from some of the following instruments:
- I3 from IRI consultants
- The Human Resources Assessment tool from the Saratoga Institute
- The Mayflower Organizational Survey
- The Gallup Organizational Survey
- Modern Survey assessment tool
- Denison cultural assessment tool
- The Hay Group
10. Further Understanding of the Cultural Health Indicator™.
This instrument is a baseline marker for the "current effectiveness" of your organization. It serves as a reference point for understanding what your organization needs to consider as a key "thought process" in the development of effective business strategies.
- When responses fall between fifty-five percent and one hundred percent healthy the culture is healthy and the organization's effectiveness Indicator is higher.
- When responses are between zero and forty-five percent healthy the organization's culture is unhealthy and it's ability to achieve its strategic goals can be severely hampered.
- When responses fall between forty-five to fifty-five percent healthy on the Indicator, the organization is in serious danger of slippage to the ineffective category because employees are unsure about the strategies, practices, policies and outcomes of the organization. This often leads to restrictive behaviors or controlling behaviors on the part of the employee, thereby reducing overall achievement of the goals and objectives of the organization.
The information collected is used to develop a very comprehensive report that will not only convey the health or unhealth of your organization, but will provide you with specific areas of strength and specific areas needing attention.
In addition, a recommendation report is available to you. It contains specific actionable solutions you can implement immediately.
11. You will receive the following information:
- A user friendly report with the findings by department, division, manager or any other segment that you deem to be important.
- An analysis of healthy areas (Strengths) and unhealthy areas (Opportunities for positive change) or what may be borderline and require immediate attention.
- Outline of all implications with specific recommendations for you and your leadership team to consider for action.
- Post survey action plan.
- Current state compared to future state and gap analysis.
12. Theories supporting the Cultural Health Indicator™.
The Indicator is driven by the process principles of our Cultural Due Diligence model for Organizational Development and Change.
The model focuses on the holistic process of change within organizations that challenges current thinking regarding readiness for change.
The Cultural Health Indicator™ is predicated on a series of theories present in the fields of Organizational Psychology, Social-Cultural Anthropology, Clinical Psychology and Business Systems Development. This diagnosis process focuses on meeting performance objectives.
The performance objective represents the ability to guide organizational adaptability, stability and innovation. Our belief is that everything is connected.
The ultimate goal of this process is to achieve high levels of satisfaction in all key business areas thereby supporting successful implementation of your business strategy.
13. What your organization gets when it is all over.
The information that is collected will be used to develop a comprehensive report that will not only convey the healthiness or unhealthiness of your organization(s) but will provide you with specific areas of strength and specific areas needing attention.
EMERGE International will provide you with a comprehensive analysis (both quantitative and qualitative) of our findings, and a specific action plan with solid recommendations for moving forward. You will receive a map of where you are, where you want to be and how to get there. The recommendations will include specific interventions.
14. Learning to administer the Cultural Health Indicator™.
If you are interested in conducting the process in your organization, we will teach you how to use the Cultural Health Indicator™ and how to conduct the analysis process yourself.
From that point forward the expense to you is the cost for each password/click that you purchase each time you administer the survey. This approach is not only extremely cost effective but will provide you with a tremendous amount of flexibility for future use.
Also, unlike many traditional employee/organizational surveys, we will provide you with the raw scores and implications based on your employee's responses. You will receive a secure link to your company (raw) data that will be hosted for one year. You will have complete access and flexibility to use this data as you see fit.
Why you should choose EMERGE International.
Our Commitment
Our goal is to support leaders and their employees in taking their organizations to the highest level of excellence by ensuring the software [people] is aligned with the hardware [structure, policies, procedures, financial goals, systems, communication, etc.]
As organizational culture experts, EMERGE International was formed to support leaders in understanding what organizational culture actually is, why it is important and what can be done to create a healthy and productive culture. Just as companies engage in financial due diligence and legal due diligence when exploring merger compatibility or feasibility of any type of internal change initiatives, EMERGE works with organizations to examine the "cultural components" of businesses.
This is accomplished utilizing our Cultural Due Diligence process and our Cultural Health Indicator™. Our approach gives new meaning to the word comprehensive. We create linkages and bridges to assess where there is congruence and where there are disconnects.
At EMERGE International, our team works with corporate leaders, human resources executives, organizational development professionals, and external consultants to thoroughly examine the culture of a business to help improve the bottom line. Our systemic approach for evaluating organizational culture and providing long-term solutions positions EMERGE, International as the leader in the cultural assessment and organizational change process.
EMERGE International
502 Huntington Street
Huntington Beach, CA 92648
Phone (480) 595-9874
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