Every month, I post three types of culture inspiration: a visual, a book, and an article to bookmark.
Visual: Culture Vocabulary
What words do you hear more often in organizations who have highly engaged employees than organizations who have less engaged employees?
Culture Amp (a culture analytics survey company) analyzed survey results across all their clients, looking at which words appeared most often in the free-form text question portion of the survey. They’ve created several data visualizations that show what highly-engaged companies are most vocal about. You can see the full set of visualizations here, but I find these three most interesting:
1. The three most common terms were: work, company, people. But, Culture Amp found that disengaged companies are more vocal about company-related issues, whereas the term people was favored by the engaged companies.
2. At companies with high employee engagement, people talk more about the culture. The term culture is ranked 11th at engaged companies, but for less engaged companies, culture ranks 58th, ranking slightly under the term pay (56th).
3. In engaged companies, people are far more likely to use the word friends, and far less likely to refer to people as colleagues.
Book: The Human Company Playbook
I’m sharing a short book with you this month— you can even read the PDF online. It’s called the Human Company Playbook, published by Luminary Labs. I went to a culture event at Luminary Lab’s headquarters, and I was so impressed by their mission: they work with leaders seeking to transform their organizations and industries. Last year they published this short guide with case studies of how small organizations are offering perks and benefits to become more human (i.e. establishing livable wages, developing creative equity plans, offering paid parental leave policies).
Article to Bookmark: A to Z guide to Culture Decks
Kudos to NOBL, for pulling together an A to Z guide to culture decks (team handbooks and culture guides). I've wrote about a few of my favorites before: Big Spaceship's Employee handbook and Facebook's Little Red Book.