If organisational culture is like the DNA of a company, organisational climate is its mood.
Yet, many organisations only utilise surveys without analysis of other culture layers. Resulting findings are limited to employee perceptions in the moment (organisational climate), making it near impossible to understand how aspects of culture affect organisational goals or outcomes.
Perceived Benefits:
- Data capture through surveys is straightforward and cost effective
- Quantitative data is easy to report and compare across the organisation or over time
- Engagement is a primary focus of employee listening strategies; culture / risk questions piggyback off these efforts helping mitigate survey fatigue
- Engagement is a vital insight for understanding and managing employee wellbeing and connection
Observed Shortfalls:
- Survey size constraints mean there is limited space to explore risk or other culture attributes with adequate detail
- Engagement KPIs, often tied to leader scorecards, can distort survey response reliability (e.g., “vote 5 to stay alive”)
- Climate is superficial and easily influenced
- Culture is multifaceted, requiring more than surveys to build a reliable understanding of its attributes and drivers in order to affect change
Provocation: An organisational predisposition to focus only on climate may indicate an organisational unwillingness to tackle complex deep-seated challenges.
Explainer: Despite their interrelation, culture and climate differ significantly in our ability to comprehend or alter them. Organisational climate is influenced by many factors and can change rapidly and frequently, whereas organisational culture is more complex and (absent of any major crisis or shock) enduring, requiring diverse assessment methods over an extended period.
In short: attempting to understand and influence organisational culture by concentrating solely on climate, is like applying fresh paint to superficial cracks in walls expecting it to strengthen a building’s core foundations.
Many organisations manage culture, climate, and engagement through combined activities measuring perceptions of behavioural norms through annual or pulse surveys. While surveys can be cost-effective, easily reported, and monitored, they only capture surface-level perceptions of how people feel in a specific moment.
Surface-level perceptions are subject to many biases that survey-only techniques cannot adequately mitigate. Actions tend to only focus on surface level factors rather than addressing deeper or systemic issues in how work is performed and resulting strategic, risk, or compliance outcomes.
The Flip: While the measurement of climate can help inform attitudes and adherence to formal organisational risk management practices, it is different from culture. Regulated entities keen to understand how organisational culture affects organisational outcomes would benefit from revisiting ‘culture’ activities to improve the depth of insights and impact of resulting actions.