To enact meaningful, targeted culture change, HR practitioners need to go beyond traditional methods of measuring culture and move towards more predictive, AI-led solutions.

Culture is a critical driver of performance – yet in many organisations, it’s often still approached as a values-led exercise rather than a measurable business asset. When left unchecked, negative behaviours can trigger employee attrition, reputational damage and a sharp decline in productivity.

Fortunately, there are early warning signs – and the tools to detect them are becoming more sophisticated.

In the latest episode of AHRI’s podcast Let’s Take This Offline, host Tani Jacobi CPHR speaks with Charlie Sull, co-founder of CultureX, which draws on one of the world’s largest workplace culture datasets to help organisations decode what’s really happening inside their walls.

Sull and Jacobi discuss how HR leaders can go beyond traditional people analytics to measure culture with the same rigour applied to financial or operational data.

Below, HRM shares an edited excerpt from the conversation.

Going deeper

Tani Jacobi CPHR: What’s one myth about organisational culture that you’d like to debunk once and for all? 

Charlie Sull: I’d like to debunk the myth that you can effectively measure a culture with a point scale survey, or a survey with a scale of one-to-five. There’s a lot of evidence that these models are not effective. 

The main reason is that when employees are faced with dozens of repetitive questions, they go on almost complete autopilot. They answer 90 per cent of all questions in the survey with the same two answers. There’s little variance. 

What you’re trying to measure is something that’s complex, rich, sophisticated and multi-dimensional. It’s got so many moving parts, and if you’re measuring it with this data, you just can’t learn what the real answer is. 

The early warning signals 

Tani Jacobi CPHR: In my experience, I find we’re sometimes responding to issues after they’ve surfaced. How do you see culture acting as an early warning system and what indicators should HR be looking out for?

Charlie Sull: You need to listen to employees effectively. Ask them questions: What do you like about working here? What don’t you like about working here? What’s your advice to management? 

But you can’t do that on a large-scale with outdated technology – you need AI. AI is very good at understanding human language and this could be one of its best use cases.

Tani Jacobi CPHR: Can you tell us more about how AI and listening applies in practice?

Charlie Sull: You might partner with your IT team and say something like, “Here’s the problem we’re facing. We’ve got this unstructured data and what we want to do is understand two things. One, what are employees saying? Two, are they speaking about those topics positively or negatively?”

If you have those two pieces of information, you can do a lot of things. You can discover where within the company employees are speaking about the things we care about the most. You can ask questions such as, ‘How are things changing over time? How do we compare to other companies? What are the most powerful drivers of employee satisfaction?’ You can get answers to these important questions with a much higher level of sophistication, even with fairly rudimentary AI.

Read HRM’s article on eight ways to reshape organisational culture.

The reality gap

Tani Jacobi CPHR: There are cases where organisations might exhibit a good culture outwardly, but when you dig into the sentiment of the team, there’s a disconnect between how cultural values are talked about and what’s happening in reality. How can HR help to address this gap?

Charlie Sull: It’s a massive disconnect for most companies. There are some exceptions we call ‘culture champions’ that really do prioritise culture. But for the vast majority of companies, their official value statements have no relationship with what their employees say. 

We did a study of about 600 of the biggest companies in the world. We looked at their value statements and what employees spoke about for those values on Glassdoor, and we found there was zero correlation between what a company officially espoused and what their employees said was going on. 

At the end of the day, they put the values on a wall and it doesn’t change anything, because all of the thought is going into what the values actually are, and none of the thought is going into how to actually implement the values. 

So how do you actually implement the values? It largely comes back to effective cultural measurement. If you know what’s going on, what to focus on, where in the company culture is breaking down and what to do about it, you’re in a good position to change the culture, assuming that top leadership is on board, and that they are invested in changing the culture. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

Listen to the full episode here

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Show notes

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