So this section will discuss how you actually measure a culture. So how do you go about measuring a culture? Well, the most common way to do that is through a survey. And literally millions of organizations in the world use culture surveys to try and understand what the current culture is like. But you can also use things called focus groups, which is where people get together and talk about some of the issues, and that is recorded and captured. Or you can observe by watching the way that people interact with each other, and the things that say the stories they tell.

Before we go on, it's just worth highlighting the difference between quantitative analysis and qualitative. And the reason these are important is because these are different ways of measuring your current culture. So you can measure your current culture using quantitative analysis, or quantitative so let's have a look. What those two different ways are. So quantitative analysis is basically when you're measuring something using numbers. That means that you can divide it into things like percentages, frequencies.

And indeed, you can put charts together, which shows, you know, 20% of people think this 90% of people believe that. And 50% of people said that they felt this was important and so on. So you get this, this kind of survey result that you can number crunch, you can put into reports, and it looks nice and clear what's being said. You can include percentages and so on. qualitative analysis is different. It's more subjective.

It's about interpreting what's happening and reporting it and understanding it in a different way. Of course, it is open to interpretation. Because that's what you're having to do. You're looking through, you're observing what people are doing. And you're trying to work out what that means in reality. It's culturally situated and the respect that people will see the same behavior differently in different situations.

So people behave in one way the workplace, perhaps in another, down the pub, or in another way with infants, their families. So these behaviors are culturally situated and will be interpreted differently, depending on the situation you find yourself in. So we'll talk about surveys from our surveys are obviously a quantitative type of analysis. What you're trying to do with a survey is you're trying to measure something that's qualitative in a quantitative way. So what do we mean by that? Well, just think about it.

If you go to a hotel or you have a meal in a restaurant and they ask you to fill out a form they may ask you How you would rate your experience in a hotel or how you would rate your experience in our restaurant. Now, your experience how you feel about that experience is actually a quantitative thing. It will depend on how you felt before you went in. That's how hungry you were, if it's a restaurant, how you were treated, how the food was the German armbands, who were with, and so on. So there will be lots of factors that will all play a part. And then before you fill that in, you have to come to a decision about what to say, you may be asked to score it on a scale of one to five or one to 10.

Or you may use something like a Likert scale, which says that makes a statement I thought it was the most wonderful place in the world. And you have to then say, I agree a lot or agree, or I don't agree or disagree. I disagree or I disagree a lot. So those sorts of questionnaires what's happening with that is you're then trying to work out in your mind which one of those boxes to tick, you take whichever box you think is most appropriate. behind those boxes are essentially some numbers, which can then get crunched. So you're starting off with a qualitative thing, which is how you felt.

And somehow through that process, it's been transformed into a set of numbers. Now, that makes it much easier to be able to manipulate the data, but there is a price to pay. And the price is is that through that process, you lose something, you lose something about the qualitative aspect of it, the nuanced response. Often if you filled out these questionnaires you find Well, there isn't a box or I really think it's quite difficult to put your point of view across. Some surveys get around that a little bit by having a box at the end where people can do some freehand descriptions. But most often, surveys are used because they can capture a lot of information relatively Simply add, the numbers can be crunched.

But don't forget you are losing something through that process. Another potential problem with surveys is people can sometimes be suspicious about it. So I've worked in organizations where we've been doing some work with them and a surveys been part of the process and, and even though the workforce are, are assured that it's absolutely nonnamous nobody's gonna know who it is the same what there's still suspicion, you know, I'm sure people can tell what I've said. And so people might feel that they don't actually want to say what they think partly for that reason, sometimes because of apathy take up can be very low. So in a workforce, let's say a manufacturing organization that you might have the vast majority of people who work in a factory or in manual tasks, you might find that only a small percentage of those people fill in the survey, but perhaps 50 60% of people in the offices In the survey, so what you end up with is a non representative sample, they get actually quite a skewed result, which of course, can be a problem, because if you're then doing something based on that data, you may be really barking up the wrong tree.

So we've already mentioned that sometimes surveys mean that you've got to do a false choice. No, that's not what I wanted. I wanted to say this thing, so it lacks that nuance. And of course, you could be asking the wrong questions in the survey. So although the data you get from a survey looks great, it's easy to manipulate. It could be that it's actually not telling you anything real about the culture.

It's just a survey that kind of looks good. The ticks a box, but is it really giving you the information you need? I'm not saying don't use surveys, we use them. I use them and they can be useful, but we definitely recommend that you're meant surveys with other ways to gather data about your current culture. So just quick question on this, if you wanted to understand the culture of a country, would you consult a survey? So let's say you're going for holidays in Bolivia or somewhere really interesting.

If you wanted to understand that country, would you consult a survey? Or would you ask people who have been there or talk to perhaps people who live there and really understand their culture that way, of course, you'd want to talk to them. So that would be your qualitative analysis. If you look at a survey, perhaps that could tell you how many people work in certain industries or how many people speak a second language, or how many people have worked abroad, but it doesn't tell you much about actual culture. So just a thought in terms of measuring and understand your culture. Make sure you're getting really good picture.

Just simply doing a bog standard culture survey is probably not going to give you that to the degree that you need it. We also need to be When we're doing analysis, whether that's in terms of surveys or talking to people, there, there can be a problem between the link between attitude and behavior. So there is often an assumed link or causal effect. In other words, attitude happens, we have an attitude, and then we go and act on it. But there's really good evidence to suggest that there's lots of reasons why people might have an aptitude according to one particular frame of mind, but not acted out. So they might think one thing, but do another.

So, again, that can be a problem when it comes to surveys. So culture surveys, assume that attitude is both stable, measurable thing that you can fill out a form a measure, and that it's a reliable indicator of behavior. And as we've already said, it's not always the case. So, as we've kind of criticized culture surveys quite a lot, we need to talk about some alternatives. I repeat It's not that we shouldn't use surveys, but they shouldn't be the only way we measure and understand what the current culture is like. So what are some other ways to measure culture?

Well, one thing that we do sometimes is called the semi structured interview, which is where we do interviews on a one to one basis. Or they could do it in groups, where you ask a set of questions, or you have a set of questions to ask. And through those questions, you allow the individual you're interviewing to kind of go off on a tangent if they want to talk a bit more freely about the question. So they may be similar questions to a survey, but because you're asking them in a one to one basis, you get a lot more nuanced responses. So the semi structured interviews are one way that you could get a more quantitative take on what people are thinking and saying. Focus groups are where you get a group of members of the workforce together and you pay Some questions are a bit like semi structured interviews, but they're much looser.

So you're really just talking about some issues, and you're trying to get the group to talk together to try and try and to get them to discuss, disagree, agree, come up with some conclusions about what things are commonly like now, and how the culture can be described. So if you want a culture of continuous improvement, let's say, and you wanted to know how far off you were from that right now, you might have a focus group which ask some questions around, you know, how important is continuous improvement? How do managers encourage people to look for ways to do things better? And so you're really trying to get them to talk about and through that conversation, people might say, Well, actually, I'm often asked about how we could do better, or probably more likely, no one ever listens to us. Lots of things I think will be changed, and so on.

So we have to be willing to hear some of that stuff. It's not always pleasant to hear or listen to. But it's important because it starts to help us to understand from the perspective of the workforce, what they actually think one of the questions on focus groups is whether we should include managers with members of the workforce, or teams, or whether we should separate them out. So we have teams talking. And then we have other teams, which are other groups, which are about managers talking. Really, that just depends, and I've done both.

It depends upon the situation. There are some benefits in having managers with members of the workforce because they can then start to talk together about some of the issues. And that's actually really powerful. Because the downside is, maybe they don't feel comfortable discussing some of the things they really think and might end up just saying things that they think their managers want to hear. So we have to look at that on a case by case basis, but it's worth thinking about both the pros and cons on that. discursive analysis is a bit technical, probably not something that happens all that often.

But it's really about listening very carefully to the way that things are discussed within the business. And then actually doing a transcript of that, and doing some analysis on that transcript. It's not something that we do very often within businesses, but it is something that psychologists sometimes do to understand what the narrative is and how things are being discussed. Probably more often, in a business setting, you perhaps have an on the shoulder coach or observer, who perhaps goes into meetings, perhaps listens to what people are saying, within the workplace. Obviously, it would have to be understood what they're there to do, and to avoid suspicion. But when I've I've done that, I've found that after a while, get to know people, they start to just get used to you and they start to behave naturally normally.

So you can really pick up some really interesting conversations, that starts to give you a really good flavor or picture for what the culture is really like. So quick summary then, ways to measure culture include surveys, focus groups and observations. We've talked about how surveys are limited in how much they tell you about the culture, and they need to be augmented through other techniques such as focus groups and observations.