A Systems Thinking Perspective on Measuring Organizational Culture
~ 14 minute read
Photo credit: NASA
Key Takeaways
Survey, conversational, and analytic data are all valid ways of understanding people
Diverse or mixed-methods can address shortcomings of individual methods and improve inclusivity
Systems thinking calls on us to expand what we measure and how
As I write this, recent layoffs and funding cuts at USAID promise to have enormous impacts on not only the lives of government staff, but on the critical care that regions receive from USAID funded services. Regardless of how you feel about the agency, the effects of this change should shake you. Writing for The Guardian, Kat Lay reports that some models estimate, “The cuts could result in 500,000 deaths over the next 10 years in South Africa.” And what is the stated reason for the cuts? “Efficiency.”
What happens when the value of people is measured by the cost of their work, and not the impact of their absence? What happens when we measure value in dollars, but not in lives and well-being?
While decades of organizational research has shown us how to effectively assess whether work works, there remains so much more to be done. Social change organizations are uniquely positioned to reimagine how we measure good work, if they are willing to recognize how deeply interconnected we all are.
A Very Brief History of Organizational Measurement
Photo credit: Markus Winkler
The marvelous device we call a smartphone is made up of thousands of elements all working in concert to tell you how likely it is to rain today. Varying arrangements of those elements, or better performing elements, might lead to faster load times, or prettier images flashed alongside your chance of showers. Measuring these arrangements, their performance, and the outcomes is foundational to adjusting with the goal of optimization.
In the early 1900s, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s idea was that in the workplace, people were among these elements. His analogy was not exactly a smartphone (see “early 1900s”), but measurement was still the basis for this form of “scientific management.” This early form of analytics required clarity on what good work actually meant and specificity about how that work was done. If the rain cloud is glitching on your app, we can look at the how behind the image to make some adjustments. In this case, it likely means some tinkering with the program.
The 2016 movie The Founder has a scene where Rick and Mac McDonald—the original architects of their namesake fast food chain—demonstrate how they precisely measured and arranged the kitchen of their restaurant. Every area of the kitchen was thought out all so that the burgers and fries that customers ordered were seamlessly prepared in 30 seconds or less. It was fast food, delivered through science. Maybe you care less about how quickly food is served, and more about retaining your best people, regardless of their identity. Take the measuring tape out of the kitchen and track hiring, performance and tenure across all demographics. With that, you might be able to build a compensation strategy that is both fair and equitable.
If you still feel something is missing, you’re right. Analytics on day-to-day operations might be all you need if you’re a line of code in a weather app, but people aren’t programs. They have motives and feelings about what they do. After all, lines of code don’t feel fulfilled or burnt out about the tasks they’ve been given. That’s why the employee survey was born just a few decades after Taylor’s method. It took two World Wars for people to fully acknowledge surveys as an important part of organizational research. And alongside it, more conversational assessments and interview formats were created.
Even though the technology used to implement these methods has advanced, modern work measurements follow from these traditions: People analytics, engagement surveys, exit interviews, focus groups. Organizations deeply invested in workplace measurement won’t just do one of these, they’ll do all of them. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses, but together, they help form a more detailed picture of the world at work.
Diversity in Measurement
Photo credit: Amy Elting
Organizations truly invested in understanding their culture and how to support their people will never rely on any one metric.
If all you measure is operations, you’ve lost the human impact.
If all you measure is numbers, you’ve lost people’s stories.
Below is a breakdown of three kinds of data involved in organizational culture measurement: Survey data, conversational data, and people analytic data.
Three Organizational Culture Data Types
| Conversational Data | Survey Data | People Analytic Data |
|---|---|---|
| Acquired in conversation with people, whether in groups (focus groups) or alone (interviews). Useful in uncovering individual and collective stories, and emerging issues. | Acquired through survey questions, including those about engagement, leadership perception, reception of initiatives and otherwise. Useful in group and over-time comparisons. | Stored and managed in hiring and people data systems. Includes information on identity, role, team, tenure, compensation, and management hierarchy. Useful in tracking behavioral and organizational actions over time. |
Each of these data types has strengths and weaknesses.
Survey data is an excellent way to get structured data on specific areas of organizational culture, including team needs, staff engagement, and leader perceptions. A good, intentional survey can help quantify where you’re at, and track changes going forward. An annual survey could help you discover high engagement among all staff, but surprisingly low engagement in your operations department. Since the data is bound by what you’re asking, you’re likely to miss emergent issues or deeper reasons for known issues.
Conversational data is more effective at bringing up issues that you either don’t know exist, or that you need more detailed input on. A focus group or series of interviews in your operations department will help you unearth stories about how the new invoicing system is leading to tension both within teams and with partners and vendors. Further analysis might also help clarify the broader story about how executives invest in shiny new systems without the input of those doing the work. The strength of this data is also its weakness: Less structure means more flexibility, but lower reliability in tracking changes over time.
People analytic data is most effective at tracking changes in the comings and goings of people over time. With a deeper look at your tenure data, you might find that the operations burnout is associated with lower retention on teams with more junior managers. It turns out that the pitfalls of the new systems are at least partly made up for by managers who already have established relationships with others. As is often the case, shortcomings in structures are made better or worse by relationships, leading to very real consequences for who stays and who leaves.
As the Data Equity Framework from We All Count attests to, the way we think about data has implications for equity. Rely too much on one method of inquiry, and you’ll only include the people who have access to that method. Mixed-methods research is one of the best practices that the Urban Indian Health Institute identifies, since quantitative methods are important, but may fail to yield statistical significance for Indigenous communities who are less represented in the data.
Diversity of method also helps you avoid Goodhart’s law, succinctly stated as “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Focus solely on improving retention and you might be able to keep your staff, but you might miss how burnt out and trapped they feel doing what they do.
Expanding Our Focus for a Change
Photo credit: Martin Fu
Let’s say you’ve done it: You’re one of those rare places that have a diverse suite of ways to understand the culture of your organization. Like processors in phones, you’re able to track performance and movement of people in your organization with expert finesse. Like many organizations, you’re also asking your people what work is like. Still, you might feel like something is missing.
Your world is more than work. The processor in your phone doesn’t clock out, read the national news, struggle to build community, face financial pressure or the responsibilities of supporting others. It doesn’t bring the weight of those experiences back the next day as it fires up the weather app. It doesn’t leave your phone, whether willingly or not, to take on other tasks on other phones.
The world is not a series of closed systems. No matter how varied the methods used to assess culture, if those methods assume that the organization exists in a vacuum, they are fundamentally flawed. In earlier posts, I’ve shared how burnout is a systemic, rather than just an organizational problem. There is nothing new about systems thinking, and as Rona Glynn-McDonald, Board Director of Common Ground, has written, “It is important to remember that First Nations communities are the original systems thinkers. . .”
Businesses are well-aware of their impact on society and society’s impact on them. Marcia Chatelain, Professor of Africana Studies at UPenn, has written about how the history of fast-food behemoth McDonald’s is intertwined with that of Black communities following the civil rights movement. In a 2020 interview, she describes how “McDonald's started to invest in black franchising after 1968, particularly after Martin Luther King's assassination, and there's a way that they've since grafted themselves onto the story of civil rights.” For many businesses there seems to be an awareness of interconnectedness, at least when it suits the bottom line.
What might it look like to be truly aware of the interconnectedness of organizational culture, and the responsibility organizations have to both their people and the broader culture? That answer will be different for every organization. Below is one depiction of how it might look, using the Culture Patterns Framework.
From Culture Patterns in One Organization to Systems Thinking
An Individual Organization's Culture Pattern
Organizational cultures in social change organizations can be depicted as varying along four different value orientations towards connection, movement, grounding and purpose.
Systems Thinking in Culture Patterns
Above is one idea of how systems thinking can apply to organizational culture, with the varied spheres of life affecting the culture of an organization, and being affected in turn. Not depicted, but still important, are how power, identity, history, and future visions within each sphere influence the dynamic.
The above only represents an initial sketch of systems thinking at play in organizational culture, where different spheres of life all affect organizational culture, which in turn influences those other spheres. Consider how this shifts the narrative of why, for example, a team is collaborative or not from simply how the team is managed to the context under which the team is managed. Perhaps more exciting for those teams and organizations hoping for greater impact, strong relationships within an organization have the potential to change culture beyond the organization for the better. Systems thinking bridges the world within the organization with that beyond the organization. It asks us to acknowledge the weight of the past and present, and the responsibility we have to the future.
Here are some questions to inform your thinking if you’re considering how to do organizational culture work from a systems thinking perspective:
Who is here, who is not, and why?
What are people bringing with them (physically, intellectually, emotionally) as they show up? What are they taking away?
Where do our people call home? Where are they welcome? Where are they not?
When people exit our organization, where do they go, what do they do, and how do they look back on their time with us?
How do society, technology, and the natural environment affect individuals’ needs and those of the organizational community? How might the experiences of our people ripple out to affect other organizations and communities beyond our programmatic intent?
The questions are only a start towards getting closer to the truth of how organizations work: Not as standalone entities, but as interconnected relations of people.
The Power of Change in Systems Thinking
In his review of how organizations “restructure,” Wayne Cascio, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver, has written that leaders often view employees as either costs to be cut or assets to be developed. In the former, leaders only see staff as dollar signs, and in times of financial stress, the logical consequence is to treat them as such by cutting expenses. In the latter, leaders see the potential return on investing in their employees, and help develop them to gain more productivity from their efforts. Really though, these are two sides of the same coin, simplifying the richness of people’s contributions to items on a ledger.
As the cuts at USAID and other agencies show, institutional actions have impacts that spread far and wide. Such “restructures” exist among social change organizations as well, with the 2024 Nonprofit Employment Data Report finding that between 2019 and 2020, nonprofits lost over 580,000 jobs. If you are one of the many who have experienced mass layoffs, you’ll know that they can have enormous personal and social consequences.
Systems thinking requires us to think of people not as resources to be used by individual organizations, but as one part of an interconnected web of relationships. The task of acknowledging and supporting people can feel daunting. It means the impacts of organizational actions matter that much more for change in the world. But it also means that strong, equitable organizational cultures have the potential to shape the broader culture for the better. Doing so means opening up to a more expansive view of what we measure and how.
