It’s rare to come across an ‘about us’ or ‘why work for us’ web page without the organisation stating they have an amazing culture.

And whilst I’m sure many companies do indeed create great cultures for their employees to thrive and succeed (as well as the business itself), it can be difficult to quantify exactly what makes a culture great.

Or, more specifically, how to actually calculate that the culture in question is a positive one and is improving as time goes by.

How can you really quantify great culture in a way that is measurable year on year and can be stacked against other organisations and past performance?

Below are three ways to start to get a calculable grasp on your company’s culture performance.

Employee referrals

If your employees are happy enough to suggest to their wider peer group that they should be on the lookout for any opportunities of joining your organisation, then it’s a safe bet to say you have a good workplace culture.

After all, staff are unlikely to recommend a friend come and work for a company they’re thinking about leaving or have major gripes with.

Actually introducing a dedicated employee referral scheme can help this process along too with incentives and referral tracking. And of course, rewarding employees for employee referrals can form part of your employee rewards and recognition scheme too.

Engagement levels

Checking in on the engagement levels of your employees can often be more of a holistic task. A walk through the office on a Tuesday afternoon to see the general vibe and busyness of the teams or the word of team leaders in the weekly catch-up.

But great employee engagement will stem from a great culture. So how can we start to measure engagement within an organisation?

First is to look at employee performance indicators that are shown to be linked to engagement levels. For example, are more deadlines being met this year than they were last year? If so, that could be an indicator that employee engagement has risen.

Also, has productivity increased? And are your employees staying at your organisation for longer than they were five years ago?

Has the percentage pay increases you’ve offered to top performers decreased, but they’re still seemingly happy at their desk and churning out great results?

All of these are telltale symptoms of a highly engaged workforce which is not possible to create without a positive culture to work within.

But how about getting some figures against engagement levels too? One way to achieve this would be to create an annual, internal engagement questionnaire for employees to anonymously complete.

This quiz can include numerous sections and be masked slightly in terms of its intentions, but within it can be a core of sliding-scale questions designed to specifically measure how engaged and motivated an employee feels right there and then.

Within one year you’ll have a good idea about how the staff really feel. Within two years you’ll have a comparative data set to measure the impact of any HR strategy and organisational changes made.

Within 5 years of assessment, analysis and action, you should see a prolonged and sustained improvement in engagement and thriving company culture.

Number of sick days

This might sound like a bit of a left-field way to assess workplace culture, but analysing the number of sick days taken within an organisation is a really handy way to get an oversight as to how your company culture is affecting employee health.

And even more so than that, fewer working hours lost to ill health is another good indicator of an engaged workforce.

First of all, absence analysis is a good test of the work-life balance your organisation has to offer. It can prove through comparative analysis whether schemes put in place to aid work-life-balance are working well, and also assess whether employee burnout is a major issue within teams and management alike.

Absence levels also hark back to employee engagement levels, too. Engaged employees are less likely to take sick days and are also less likely to feel the effects of the aforementioned staff burnout.

So aside from a flu pandemic or days lost to a growing events schedule that includes more and more post-awards night hangover days, assessing your absences can give you a good, in-depth look into how your company culture is performing on a level that affects the actual health of your employees.

If absences are high, you can create schemes to challenge it such as flexible working, the ability for employees to buy more holidays, free fruit in the canteen and an enhanced focus on appreciating staff and putting in place programmes to boost employee engagement levels.

How does your business assess the organisational and workplace culture impact on your employees? Leave a comment below!