The Power of Culture Assessment in Shaping Organizational Policy 

Culture Assessment is defined as the study of differences between a company’s existing (real) work culture and the expected (ideal) work culture. 

A multi-step culture assessment guides a company in strategizing its ethical foundation. From formulating guidelines regarding an organization’s expectations and philosophy to developing acceptable norms of the employee and stakeholder conducts— culture assessment looks after everything. 

A company’s business continuity plan is anchored by its culture. The document outlines the upcoming visions, missions, etc., that will facilitate growth for employees and the organization. 

The Core of Culture Assessment 

The Competing for Values Framework is the most preferred mechanism for Culture Assessment. Based on the empirical research model, the Competing Value Framework(CVF) propels organizations to become competent and effective. Companies often use a competing values research framework to evaluate culture and amend their growth strategies accordingly. 

The Competing Value Framework is based on four quadrants derived from the following: 

1. Comparing standardized organizational factors existing across enterprises. 

2. Identifying and analyzing variables of a unique nature that exist between different organizations. 

The cross-functional features of business operations implemented in several companies— form the corner store of Competing Value Analysis. 

Following are the different types of quadrants incorporated in different CVFs. 

Quadrant Type	Functionality Within an Organization	Benefits
The Collaborate Quadrant	Represents the people, processes, and purposes of organizations.   Facilitates cross-departmental communications.   Helps management to stay loyal to customers, stakeholders, members, and employees     Strengthens organizational values and facilitates employee commitment.	Elevates the employee preference score of companies.   Leaders are more trustworthy and nurturing, which boosts organizational image.   The collaborative quadrant gains customer trust for a company.
The Create Quadrant	Creating quadrants promotes creativity and innovation inside an organization.   In a creativity-driven organization, the create quadrant work culture fits and performs the best.    The create quadrant sharpens an organization’s vision to stay ahead of its competitors in the future. For the same, the quadrant encourages a lot of experimentation.	The Create Quadrant can facilitate meaningful changes in the operation of a business.   Helps to build a robust vision-oriented work culture.   Creating quadrant model-infused experimentations help unexpected future solutions, which allows a business to scale heftily.
The Compete Quadrant	Inside a company ecosystem, it Infests an aggressive competition and achievement trend.    Helps to build a reward-based ecosystem where people are either termed winners or losers.     The pressure created by competitive business strategies doesn’t accept any errors or mistakes on anybody’s part.	Yield fruitful results, without deflection, in minimal time.
The Control Quadrant	This type of quadrant is unleashed in an organization to establish dependencies and collaborations.	Helps an organization to plan more efficiently, process in less amount of time, reduce waste production, and enforce compliance.    Aids in cost-cutting and establishing strict policy guidelines to be followed.

For any organization, determining which quadrant to apply in its operations requires a lot of assessment. 

If the company culture is well assessed and understood— then only a rich concept like CVF can be fruitfully applied.   

RELATED: 85+ Employee Check-In Questions for Every Situation 

5 Prominent Work Culture Models 

Innovative Work Culture 

Businesses benefit from an innovative work culture by challenging the barriers of existing conservative work ecosystems. 

Zoom, Slack, and GitLab remain the top players in the business world, following an innovative work culture. 

RELATED: Top Organizational Culture Examples To Get You Inspired 

Aggressive Work Culture 

Companies accompanying an aggressive work culture try to outperform all their competitors by unleashing a do-or-die stand for employees. Employees have an unfavorable impression of these organizations because of how they treat their workers. These businesses often struggle to find and retain employees. 

Employees of this culture describe the working environment as “bruising,” “relentless,” “Churn and Burn,” etc.,  

Result-driven Culture 

Result Driven Cultures only focus on the metrics defining company growth and real-time ROI generation. These companies often value metrics, numbers, and statistical documentation the most. For satisfactory performances, they do reward the managers and executives.  

People wrongly identify result-driven culture as exploitative, but it is not the truth. Result-driven cultures minimize distraction, deflection, and waste production. It motivates employees to stay active while generating real-time ROI and accelerating the business continuity plan.  

Forbes has a well-deserved reputation for its ethical yet results-oriented workplace. This class includes not only Adobe but also Netflix. 

Stable Culture 

Companies following a bureaucratic work culture model are considered stable and functioning best. Ensuring a healthy work-life balance remains a core ethic of these organizations. Team members follow designated patterns of work based on department-level commands. 

Organizations with micromanaged employees often have trouble adapting to rapid change. Generally, Governmental Organizations follow this structure. 

Employee-centric Culture 

Even though controversies abound about whether a company culture can still be 100% employee-centric, companies are becoming increasingly employee-centric.  The goal of an employee-centric organization is to maintain a work-life balance, encourage innovation, pay appropriately, and not discriminate based on gender, race, color, or creed. 

There are several companies with employee-centric work cultures, such as Facebook and TCS.  

Find out your company’s work culture by conducting a survey using these questions. 

The 8 Best Questions For Company Culture Evaluation Surveys 

• Is the management approachable and encouraging? Do they adapt quickly to changes? 

• Do individuals have clear goals regarding the vision and mission of upcoming projects? 

• How does the management react when things don’t work as expected in the organization? 

• Is there pressure from top management on the subordinates? 

• Do you think that you can influence your workplace with new ideas and innovations? 

• At bad times, does the management act concerned for the employees? 

• How do the teams, individuals, and functional areas react to incompatible goals? 

Next Steps? 

We recommend starting cultural change with a culture evaluation. Results can spark important conversations that transform your organization. Asking if they want a wonderful workplace motivates employees. People will do remarkable things to make a difference. 

You may not be ready to lead organizational change. If needed, SurveyPoint can assist with change. Find out how your organization’s culture can be better communicated by taking a survey.