Measuring Future Readiness: The Culture Metrics of High-Performance Organizations

Companies with future-ready cultures go beyond the most common culture metrics.

Many companies today rely on regular culture metrics to monitor the ongoing health of the organization. There are a variety of ways to gather culture metrics; several will already be available in the company HRIS or other financial reporting systems. But others will need to be gathered through focus groups, engagement surveys, pulse surveys, exit interviews, and other forms of sentiment analysis.

The most popular metrics to gather are common HR metrics such as employee engagement and retention (or attrition), as well as business metrics. But are these the most effective?

Companies with future-ready workforces tend to use more insightful metrics. For example, to assess the health of their culture vs. very toxic cultures, they are more likely to use:

• Innovation
• Healthcare costs
• Employee well-being
• Candidate experience

While some culture metrics are single data points (such as attrition, employee referrals, or hotline activity) many others are indexes made up of a variety of metrics. Depending on industry, organizations will take different approaches to measuring items such as innovation or inclusion, but the healthiest of companies will roll up indexes and other measures and report them in the form of a dashboard or scorecard.

Use the chart below as a guide and benchmark for your own culture metrics, and download our Future-Ready Culture Executive Summary (i4cp members: download the full report here) for more information on how future-ready organizations do things differently.