This post is a guide with everything employees need to know about workplace culture assessments.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What are workplace culture assessments?
How do you conduct a workplace culture assessment?
FAQs Employees Often Ask About Workplace Culture Assessments
Working in a toxic workplace can feel hopeless. Fortunately, workplace culture assessments can help improve a toxic workplace culture. But if you’re an employee, you should do your research before your employer conducts one. This post explores everything you need to know about culture assessments. It also answers a few burning questions employees often have.
WHAT ARE WORKPLACE CULTURE ASSESSMENTS?
Working in a toxic workplace can make employees feel powerless, especially in a culture where workers are conditioned to forget their worth. Employers normally don’t authorize workers to make substantial changes. And managers normally cause the toxicity with their micromanagement, bias, and unreasonable expectations. So how does an organization figure out it has a toxic workplace culture? And how does it fix it?
Workplace culture assessments are like doctor’s visits for employers…Some are like routine check-ups…But most culture assessments are like visits to the emergency room.
Workplace culture assessments (often called audits, reviews, or investigations) are like doctor’s visits for employers. They figure out if a workplace is healthy by looking at factors like whether employees like their jobs, whether leaders clearly communicate expectations, and whether there are unfair wage gaps. They also might determine whether the organization’s policies line up with its values and goals. For example, a company might claim to value diversity equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), but an assessment could show that it has inequitable policies.
There are different types of workplace culture assessments. Some are like routine check-ups, where leaders just want to make sure their organization’s workplace culture is healthy. But most culture assessments are like visits to the emergency room, where organizations urgently need to address workplace scandals or crises. For example, NBCUniversal recently hired an assessment team to investigate whether its CEO had an “inappropriate relationship” with another employee. You may also remember when the NBA hired an assessment team to look into whether the owner of the Phoenix Suns harassed employees and used the n-word.
Organizations should carefully choose who will conduct their workplace culture assessments. Leaders of an organization can do it, or they can hire an outside consultant or team. But since management can be (or at least seem) biased, they often hire a third-party to make sure the investigation is completely independent. Corporations normally retain law firms because lawyers have a professional responsibility to keep their client’s information confidential. For instance, the NBA hired a New York law firm to investigate the Phoenix Suns, and NBCUniversal hired outside counsel to investigate its CEO.
HOW DO YOU CONDUCT A WORKPLACE CULTURE ASSESSMENT?
Organizations pay experts thousands of dollars to conduct workplace culture assessments, which require lots of time, expertise, and planning. Each organization is unique, so no two assessments are the same. But assessments generally follow 4 steps: 1) a consultation with organization leaders, 2) an investigation into stakeholder perspectives and experiences, 3) document review, and 4) a report and set of recommendations.
Consultation and Scoping
To begin, the assessment team tries to figure out the goals and scope of their investigation. They discuss the purpose of the investigation with whomever hired them, which is usually the organization’s board of trustees or shareholders. They also interview top leaders, like the CEO, to figure out what departments, employee groups, and topics they should learn more about.
Most employees are not involved in the assessment at this point because the assessment begins by talking to the highest-level leaders. If the investigation is mostly about a specific incident that involved employees, the team might also talk to the employees involved to get a general idea of what happened.
Stakeholder Perspectives and Feedback
Next, the assessment team tries to gather a variety of perspectives about the organization or event. The team conducts as many one-on-one interviews as possible to understand people’s thoughts and attitudes. If the investigation concerns a specific department, the team may interview everyone in that department. Or investigators might interview anyone that wants to volunteer relevant information.
The assessment team might also speak with people in groups. Workplace investigators often meet with employee resource groups, like the organization’s Women’s Alliance or Black Employee’s Association, to see if people with common identities have similar experiences. They may also hold town hall meetings. Group meetings are helpful because people can agree or disagree with each others’ experiences in real time.
In many workplace culture assessments, investigators also gather anonymous employee surveys. This way, they can still hear from people who may not feel comfortable talking to the assessment team directly. Anonymous surveys are particularly effective in hostile workplaces where employees might fear that leaders will retaliate against them for speaking up.
Document Review
Workplace culture assessment teams also review documents like organization charts, internal policies, value statements, and even emails to learn more about the organization or incident. Typically, the assessment team creates a timeline using documents and information from interviews. The timeline helps them figure out the order and context of important policies and events.
Employees play an important role during the document review process. Managers may ask them to collect emails, memos or other documents for the assessment team to review. The assessment team may even ask employees questions about specific records to better understand what the documents mean or why they were created.
Report and Recommendations
In the last step of a workplace culture assessment, the assessment team summarizes its findings and recommends next-steps for the organization. Investigators use information they learned during the previous steps to write a detailed report about the main issues they discovered. The report includes actions the organization should take to improve the workplace, like changing policies, restructuring departments, or even firing bad actors.
Employees normally care most about this step because it has the most potential to create change at the organization. It also gives leaders an opportunity to hear the stories employees shared with investigators. This can be healing for people who’ve experienced trauma or abuse from a toxic workplace. Leaders can normally choose whether to share the report publicly. But if they do, employees have a public document they can use to hold leaders accountable.
FAQs EMPLOYEES OFTEN ASK ABOUT WORKPLACE CULTURE ASSESSMENTS (AND THEIR ANSWERS)
Employees often have a lot of questions when their organization announces it will undergo a workplace culture assessment. Here, are the most common questions and their answers.
Will I get in trouble for participating in my company’s workplace culture assessment?
Probably not. Employers agree to undergo workplace culture assessments because they want to show they’re making an effort to address workplace issues. They want employees to participate to make sure the assessment team has enough information to conduct a proper investigation. Plus, it may be against the law for employers to punish you for participating in an employer-sponsored investigation.
But you should be careful about what you share. You could get in trouble if you share information that suggests you broke the law or violated company policy. You could also be disciplined if the assessment team determines that you are responsible for your organization’s toxic culture. For example, Uber’s CEO was stripped of responsibilities and pressured to resign, after a culture assessment suggested that he contributed to a culture of sexual harassment and gender discrimination.
If I participate in my company’s workplace culture assessment, will my identity actually be anonymous?
It depends. Assessment teams want to encourage people to give real, honest information. So investigators try to keep participants’ identities anonymous to make them feel more comfortable. For example they might only share general themes and trends with the organization, not individual stories. Or they might use a third-party website to anonymize employee surveys.
But there’s almost always a tiny chance that your identity could be disclosed if you participate. Good assessment teams keep records of the interviews they do. If the organization ends up involved in a lawsuit, there’s a chance those records could be disclosed, particularly if the investigators aren’t lawyers that could claim attorney-client privilege. And sometimes a story is so specific that if investigators include it in the report, the organization could figure out who it’s about even without having the person’s name.
Ultimately, assessment teams will do their best to protect your identity because they want to protect their reputations. If word gets out that they disclosed their sources, they’ll have a hard time getting people to talk to them in the future.
Does the organization have to take the assessment team’s recommendations?
Normally, no. Organizations don’t have to implement the assessment team’s recommendations unless they agree to do so as a part of a legal process or settlement. For example, in 2020, Pinterest settled a race and sex discrimination lawsuit by agreeing to undergo an audit of its DEI practices. But most times, organizations choose to participate in workplace culture assessments, so they don’t have to listen to the assessment team.
On the other hand, it’s in the organization’s best interest to implement the recommendations. Leaders hire assessment teams to help solve workplace issues that they couldn’t solve on their own. And continuing down the same road leaves the organization open to future problems. Also, if the public knows about the assessment and the organization releases the report, it would hurt the organization’s reputation if leaders ignored the recommendations.
Can employees make organizations agree to undergo a workplace culture assessment?
Generally, no. As discussed above, most workplace culture assessments are purely voluntary. But employees may be able to use collective action or other routes to convince their organization to undergo a culture assessments. Many investigations happen after employees speak publicly about negative workplace experiences, like in the Uber case. But anyone thinking about going this route should know that martyrs often pay a high price.
This post was all about workplace culture assessments.
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