Why Research Culture?

As I’ve been touting myself about, I get the occasional objection. And probably the most common is: “I get employer brand, I understand employee engagement but why do you bang on about researching culture too?”

I’m a big believer in the interconnectedness of all things, and I think brand, engagement and culture are all intertwined. Intertwined to such a degree that it took my first eight blog posts to pick my way through it. (Maybe I should go back on that and get it down to one…)

Now, certainly, when looking at employer brand or employee engagement, there’s really only so many types of engaging experiences that you can have with an employer – and plenty of people have produced lists of those: Achievers and David Zinger and Best Companies. So, what I’m looking for as a researcher is two things:

1.       The combination of those engaging experiences that exist at that employer.
But there’s a finite number of combinations. And if you’re looking for x things, there’s x! combinations, and if there’s y employers in the world x! << y.
Or to put it another way, your employer ain’t so unique after all. It’s not so complex and interconnected. But it is, if you look also at:
2.       Culture.
The way you do things. Your values made real. The decisions your people make. That particular way that you operate as an organisation, and bring those engaging experiences to life.
That’s where it does get different and where your employer – and the experience you promise your employees and candidates - becomes truly, actually unique.
I’m not going to pretend that this is new. Every piece of employer comms that you’ve ever said “It’s good, but it’s not right for us/them” – that was a cultural judgement. But increasingly, people buy your products because of your culture. They choose hospitals or schools because of culture. Candidates and employees choose you based on culture. And that’s why good insight into the culture your employees experience, and how it can be improved, is so important.

Getting the best from research: Interviews

“I’ve always believed one-to-ones are more effective than focus groups” – so asserted a client last week. And I agreed. Their reasoning was that you can get a crowd mentality in focus groups – which can certainly be true (but then if you’re looking at workplace issues, you can get a crowd mentality there too.)
 

For me, it’s about arithmetic. If I speak to one person for just 15 minutes, I’ll get more from them than I will from any of the 12 people I speak to for 90 minutes. I’ll have the chance go deeper and explore more with them – and possibly to deviate a bit more from the interview guide.

But the chief down-side is arithmetical too. It takes a lot more time to speak to as many people. In those 90 minutes, I can talk to a maximum of 6 people one-to-one (and realistically fewer than that). It’ll create more transcripts, which will take longer to administrate, to analyse and to report. 

There are the benefits of being able to get more quickly and further into people’s heads. That can really help to understand what may initially seem like and alien organisation. And people may be willing to be even more open one-to-one. And, of course, you only have one person to manage. That’s, usually, manageable.

But there are downsides too. To some extent your interviewee may be devious, truculent and unreliable. They may have their own agenda and - particularly if they’re more senior – may be rather good at bringing you round to their opinion. You need to guard against this. Or they might not really want to take part and - taking your call between meetings - there’s only you to jolly them along.

And of course, there’s no-one but you to challenge them or introduce new ways of thinking - and it may not be appropriate for you to involve yourself like that. You can give them a good experience and make them feel valued, but you’re the only person that will learn anything new from the session. Sometimes focus groups can gain their own internal momentum, which can be very powerful.

So, you need to make sure you’ve got the best use of budget and time. Don’t put your eggs in one type of research – and I can help you strike the right balance.