Cultural Assessment Tools

Hiring for culture transforms teams. Ask these 6 questions to get it right. "Hiring for culture" isn't just a buzzword: it's a game-changer. A dream team with the right dynamics can skyrocket your productivity and retention. But here's the million-dollar question: How do you find that perfect person? The one who complements and enhances your current team dynamic? I used to struggle with this. Early in my entrepreneurial journey, I hired someone who looked perfect on paper but clashed with our team culture. The tension affected productivity and morale. That experience taught me the importance of looking beyond skills and focusing on cultural fit. Today, I'm fortunate to have an incredible team working with me. Here are my top 5 questions to uncover whether someone aligns with company culture: 1/ Describe a work environment that you've loved. What made it special? ↳ This reveals what they value in a workplace. 2/ Tell me about a time you disagreed with a company decision. How did you handle it? ↳ Their response shows how they navigate conflicts and communicate concerns. 3/ What's the most creative idea you've implemented in one of your previous roles? ↳ This shows how they solve problems and take initiative. 4/ How do you prefer to receive feedback, and how often? ↳ This highlights their openness to growth and communication preferences. 5/ Can you share an example of a mistake you've made at work and how you handled it? ↳ This reveals their accountability, problem-solving approach, and ability to learn from errors. BONUS: A powerhouse question from Simon Sinek: 6/ "I hate surprises. Can you tell me something that might go wrong now so that I'm not surprised in the future?" This question is a game-changer. It: ↳ Tests honesty and self-awareness ↳ Reveals how candidates approach potential challenges ↳ Gives insight into their understanding of the role and industry ↳ Opens up a meaningful dialogue about expectations and problem-solving By asking these questions, you're not just assessing skills: You're evaluating how well a candidate will integrate into your team and contribute to your company culture. What would you add to this list? Let me know below ⬇️ ♻️ These 6 interview questions aren't your typical ones: Share this post to help your network build stronger teams. 🔔 Follow me, Jen Blandos, for daily business tips.

Why rely solely on surveys when you can uncover the true state of DEI through concrete metrics? This is a question that echoes in my mind each time I embark on a new journey with a client. Surveys can provide valuable opinions, but they often fall short of capturing real facts and the nuanced realities of individuals within an organization. 🔎 Here are 6 key DEI metrics that truly matter: 📍 Attrition Rates: Take a closer look at why employees are leaving, especially among different groups. This will help you understand if there are specific challenges or issues that need to be addressed to improve retention. 📍 Leadership Pipeline Diversity: Evaluate the diversity within your leadership team. Are there opportunities for underrepresented individuals to rise into leadership roles? Are they equally represented on all levels of leadership? 📍 Promotion and Advancement Rates: Assess if all employees, regardless of background, are getting equal opportunities to advance in their careers. By monitoring promotion and advancement rates, you can identify any biases and work towards creating a level playing field. 📍 Pay Equity: Ensure that everyone is paid fairly and equally for their work. Address any discrepancies in pay based on not only gender, but also race, age, ethnicity or other intersectional factors. 📍 Hiring Pipeline Diversity: Examine the diversity of candidates in your hiring process. Are you attracting a wide range of talent from different backgrounds? Tracking this metric helps you gauge the effectiveness of your recruitment efforts in creating a diverse workforce. 📍 Employee Engagement by Demographic: Measure the level of engagement and satisfaction among employees from various groups. Are there any disparities in engagement levels? Run the crossings of identity diversity and organizational one. By focusing on these 6 concrete metrics, you can gain real insights into your organization's DEI progress based on actionable data that drives progress. ________________________________________ Are you looking for more HR tips and DEI content like this?  📨 Join my free DEI Newsletter: https://lnkd.in/dtgdB6XX

Employees who don’t like their organization’s culture are 24% more likely to quit. 👇 Why? ---> Lack of Awareness ---> Misaligned Values ---> Poor Adaptability ---> Ineffective Leadership Organizations must understand and shape culture intentionally. How? By using proven frameworks that unlock its power. Consider these impactful models: ---> Schein's Three-Level Model Artifacts, Espoused Values, and Underlying Assumptions shape team behavior. ---> Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Six dimensions—like Power Distance and Individualism vs. Collectivism—help decode diversity. ---> Denison's Organizational Culture Model Mission, Adaptability, Involvement, and Consistency drive high performance. ---> Cameron and Quinn's Competing Values Framework Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy, and Market—four culture types, each with unique strengths. Each framework equips you to shape culture as a strategic advantage. Yes, they help you avoid the 70%. But also... They transform culture into a driver of business growth and success. ➟ Focus intentionally. ➟ Lead effectively. ➟ Align your values. ➟ Perform with purpose. -- Think this insight could help others? Pass it on ♻️ or follow Alan (AJ) Silber for more.

"But where are you really from?" It's a question that makes many of us cringe, yet it points to exactly what makes multicultural teams invaluable. Those complex identities and layered perspectives that can't be reduced to a single origin story? They're organizational superpowers. Let's talk facts. McKinsey's research shows companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity are 36% more likely to outperform on profitability. Boston Consulting Group found that companies with above-average diversity scores report 19% higher innovation revenues. These aren't marginal gains, they're competitive advantages that directly impact the bottom line. However, what the numbers don't fully capture is that multicultural teams solve problems differently. When you bring together people with varied cultural backgrounds, you get cognitive diversity, different approaches to risk, communication styles, problem-solving frameworks, and decision-making processes. A team that includes someone who grew up navigating collectivist cultures alongside those from individualist societies will naturally consider broader stakeholder impacts. That's not political correctness; that's strategic thinking. Innovation thrives at cultural intersections. PayPal's success came from Ukrainian, Polish, and Chinese immigrants collaborating with American-born founders. Google's search algorithm was co-created by a Russian immigrant. These breakthroughs happen because multicultural teams question assumptions that homogeneous groups take for granted. The global marketplace demands cultural fluency. Organizations with multicultural workforces don't need to hire expensive consultants to explain why their product messaging offended an entire continent or why their expansion strategy ignored crucial cultural norms. That intelligence lives in-house, preventing costly mistakes and identifying opportunities others miss. Yes, multicultural teams can experience more conflict initially. Research shows diverse teams debate more, challenge more, and take longer to build trust. But that friction creates better outcomes, more thorough analysis, fewer blind spots, and decisions that consider multiple perspectives. Comfort isn't the goal; excellence is. The organizations thriving today understand a simple truth: homogeneity is a luxury we can no longer afford. In an interconnected world, multicultural teams aren't just nice to have, they're a strategic imperative. They reflect our markets, understand our customers, and create solutions for the world that actually exists, not the one we imagine from a single viewpoint. The future belongs to organizations brave enough to embrace the full spectrum of human perspective. That's not idealism, that's smart business. 🌍 AA✨ —————————————————————————— 👋🏾 Hi, I’m Abi: Founder of The Culture Partnership. Follow + 🔔. I discuss organizational culture, inclusion, leadership, social equity & justice.

Harvard Business Review recently published a study on cultural transformation that really stood out to me. The key finding: culture doesn’t change through communication alone, it changes through systems. The researchers show that when leaders focus only on telling people about new values, behaviours rarely stick. But when they redesign the systems like incentives, workflows, and decision rights people naturally adapt their behaviour, and culture shifts in a sustainable way. One of the most powerful takeaways is that systems quietly teach people what’s truly important. If the system rewards collaboration, people collaborate. If the system penalises risk, innovation stalls no matter how inspiring the CEO’s speech might be. It’s a reminder that real change comes from aligning what we say with how the organisation actually works.

How does your organization's DEI initiatives measure up? DEI expert Lee Jourdan highlights seven crucial metrics that span the entire employee life cycle, offering a true gauge of your DEI progress, and whether your organization is truly a meritocracy. From assessing attrition rates and performance to examining pay equity and inclusion, these indicators provide a view into whether your company is living up to its DEI promises. As Jourdan writes, "We know that what gets measured gets done. We also know that transparent data provides one version of the truth and helps organizations determine priorities." Read the full article here: #InclusionMatters #DEIprogress #Diversity #Equity Image alt-text: Bars of various colors and lengths arranged in a half circle.

Interviews are designed to evaluate you on two things - Core competency and Culture Fit and to be honest, both are equally important. Core competency is what most of us prepare for, but what about the other? A couple of coding tests and system design rounds are enough to test the skills. However, evaluating cultural fit is ambiguous and subjective. When I interview someone, I look for the following three things 1. enthusiasm for the role, 2. how pleasant it will be to work with with him/her, and, 3. attitude and behavior under a pressure situation The above pointers hold for more companies and interviewers, but the list is not exhaustive by any means. To demonstrate that you are a culture fit for any company, I would highly recommend you to 1. research the company, role, and team, well 2. listen before you speak 3. never interrupt the interviewer 4. disagree, but with respect and humility 5. emphasize collaboration and demonstrate genuine curiosity 6. acknowledge that your past achievements were the team's success 7. show enthusiasm for the company's mission and goals. Remember, for any pointer you put forth, back it with some situation or incident from your experience; keep it short and crisp. The most important gesture, end the interview by thanking the interviewer for his/her time. It might just tip the scale in your favor. No matter if you are an exceptional engineer, if you cannot be a team player, the company would be happy to part ways with you. Nobody wants to work with a genius jerk. By the way, I made a blunder in one of my Google interviews and got a strong no for that round. But, given that I got a strong yes in other rounds, I got in; but that's the story for some other time. #AsliEngineering #CareerGrowth

The common response I hear any time someone mentions "culture fit" is "bias". Some people have tried to rebrand "culture fit" to "culture add" but at the end of the day, it's really semantics in my experience, and by dismissing its importance, I think a lot of folks are shooting themselves in the foot. What people think when they hear "culture fit" is: - attends happy hours with the boss - was in the same frat as the hiring manager - uses sports analogies But when I hear hiring managers talk about "culture fit", I hear: - embodies our core values - shows curiosity and asks questions - has low ego and seeks out feedback - proactively generates solutions to problems they've identified - brings traits to the table that are currently missing from the team Technical skills are a baseline, and in most fields, they actually become less important as you progress while soft skills and ability to navigate the internal culture and ways of operating become more and more important. And there are usually a blend of hard and soft skills behind the values that get lumped together as "culture fit". For example, at Zapier, we have a value, "Build the Robot", and in practice, it looks like being solution-oriented, finding ways to automate processes or otherwise increase efficiency, etc. If someone is in an interview process, and they highlight an inefficiency they identified and how they addressed it, they're demonstrating how they "built the robot". On the flip side, if they say that improving processes isn't their responsibility so they haven't had the chance to increase efficiency yet, this might raise questions around their ability to "build the robot". And the good news is that this is usually the stuff that you can demonstrate even if you don't have all of the technical skills. - Study a company's values - Ask the recruiter for insights into the soft skills that the hiring team values - Think through stories that can help you show how you've demonstrated these You'll likely see a lot more success in your interviews.

Given heightened marketplace uncertainty and transparency, organizations are struggling to quantify the impact of their inclusion work. My ally Victoria Mattingly recommends these ideas to start: 1. Hiring Data: Review hiring data at each stage of the selection process to see if historically marginalized candidates are not advancing. This can help an organization discover if inclusive hiring practices need to be revisited and ensure the candidate pool is diverse from the start. 2. Retention and Promotion Rates: Analyze retention and promotion rates to see if employees from historically marginalized groups are leaving at higher rates or are consistently passed over for advancement. This data could signal a need for more inclusive performance management processes and help a company understand if its culture is one where all employees can thrive. 3. Pay Equity Audits: Conduct comprehensive pay equity audits to identify disparities in compensation across gender, race, and other identity markers. While this might feel risky or even costly, the financial and reputational cost of a discrimination lawsuit is far greater. As Mattingly points out, pay inequality is a primary driver of turnover and can be a significant drag on a company’s bottom line. 4. Performance Evaluation Data: Combing through performance evaluation data can uncover patterns of bias if certain groups of employees are consistently rated lower or receive fewer growth opportunities. If the data shows a consistent pattern of lower scores for a particular demographic, it's a clear signal that bias may be influencing evaluations. 5. Leadership and Development Tracking: Track participation in leadership development programs, sponsorship initiatives, and high-visibility projects. This serves as a proactive indicator of whether all employees have access to advancement pathways. If the same groups of people are consistently getting these opportunities, it's a sign that the playing field isn't level. Full piece here: https://lnkd.in/gtTQ7yQf #inclusion #culture #leadership

STOP asking "What's the culture like?" in interviews. You'll get the same answer every single time. I've been recruiting for 18 years, and candidates who ask better questions always stand out. Here are 10 questions that will reveal the REAL culture: Questions that uncover truth: → What do new employees find most surprising after they start? → Tell me about a time you supported someone's growth here → How do you handle employee feedback - can you give an example? → Walk me through your actual onboarding process → What happened the last time someone disagreed with leadership? → How are wins celebrated? What about when projects fail? → What's one thing that's changed since you joined? → How do employees here continue learning and developing? → Can you share when company values influenced a tough decision? → What would help me understand how people work together here? Remember: The way they answer tells you more than what they answer. Do they light up? Hesitate? Give vague responses? Your gut will know if this is where you belong. Don't make the mistake of accepting an offer without truly understanding if the team aligns with "your" values. Got a favourite culture question? Drop it below 👇 Joshua Talreja #culture #interviews #jobseekers #hiring #jobs