Understanding your learning culture
A cultural audit is possibly one of the most important things you can do from a learning and development perspective.
Gaining a true and detailed understanding of the people that make up your company’s workforce, can save time, effort and resources in so many other areas of your business. Yet few organisations do more than embark on the classic organisational questionnaire that focuses on approval ratings for business initiatives and the individuals’ views on the business itself.
In order to carry out a meaningful cultural audit we must structure our approach as marketers do when researching consumer markets. Structuring questions designed to raise self-awareness to enable the audience to fully communicate its attitudes, interests, preferences and lifestyles.
Imagine that you read an advertisement for shampoo that was worded using the organisational questionnaire approach:
“We believe that clean hair is good for you and the people around you and if you buy our shampoo we will become successful, make money and create jobs—doesn’t that sound good?”
The answer of course is yes, your logic is fine but what’s in it for me?
Calling on the collective interest of a workforce simply isn’t enough to engage people at an individual level. This is why the same shampoo advertisement is more likely to read:
“If you really want to be noticed—Beautiful shampoo will make your hair shine like never before!”
The whole emphasis of the communication has changed to promote self-interest, rather than communicating what the company wants.
A cultural audit will help you to find out what drives and motivates your people. Once you harness your employees individual strengths you can really tap in to their collective strengths. Surveys, interviews and focus groups are structured to reveal attitudes, preferences and lifestyles which in turn will help you to create creative learning materials that are specifically designed to appeal to the individual’s self-interest thus promoting employee engagement.
Top tips for carrying out cultural audits.
1. Gain views from a good cross section of your workforce – it is important to know what makes the poor performers tick as well!
2. When compiling a questionnaire include questions on hobbies, interests, preferred reading, TV programmes and sports. Avoid politics, religion and ethnicity unless you want to sound like a tax form!
3. Make focus groups fun and interactive. Use plenty of visual stimuli and make sure you provide a diverse cross section – not all of your employees will favour the Guardian or the Independent, so make sure you also include the Sun and Heat magazine.
4. Encourage people to contribute their stories, use discussion topics like films, restaurants, dating, complaining; all of which reveal the more colourful side of an individual’s nature.
5. Look for patterns among the workforce e.g. keen cooks; sports enthusiasts; book clubs etc. This will help you to segment the audience.
6. Build personae – some organisations even create caricatures of their segmented workforce and give them names. Again this is common practice amongst marketers, helping creative teams to get to grips with the audience.
7. Creating focus groups amongst segments of your audience are likely to increase your detailed knowledge.
8. Incorporating elements of choice as part of the structure of your questioning also encourages engagement as this creates a perception among the audience that they are in control.
9. Including life skills such as learning how to get what you want; how to be optimistic etc. provide added value to your audience as well as increasing the overall interest in your process.
10. Using stories to illustrate discussion topics will help to humanise the subject matter and make it easier to understand.
