Culture Audit for Business 

Justice, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging in business

Why Conduct a Culture Audit? 

There are two primary reasons to look at your current culture: 

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1. Your current culture seems positive, but you want to create a culture that will best support the accomplishment of your business goals; understanding the current culture is the first step to determine what to keep and what to change.

2. You already believe your current culture is damaged and hurting your success, and you want to take steps to understand why. Damaged cultures are characterized by negativity, complaining, underachievement, less-than-positive relationships, leadership that fails to respect people, low levels of trust, a lack of volunteerism, low contribution of discretionary energy, and usually, in reasonable economic times, high turnover. 

3.  A culture audit can help you find out the degree of belonging your employees feel in the workplace. 

Inclusion: Every member of your organization should be invited actively to participate in all aspects of your organization.

Belonging: Belonging is a key component of inclusion. When employees are truly included, they perceive that the organization cares for them as individuals, their authentic selves. All members of an organization should have the confidence and support to contribute their unique perspectives to every aspect of your organization.

Organizations can only really benefit from their diversity if all members in their community feel they truly belong, feel fully safe, and hence have the confidence to be themselves and say what they are thinking.

How we conduct the culture audit?                    

A culture audit normally requires a variety of methods to assess the current state of the culture in your organization. 

To assess your culture, we use, 

• Culture walks, observation in the workplace; 

• Culture interviews or focus groups of employees; 

• Individual employee culture interviews; 

• Culture surveys, often developed internally based on       collected information; and 

• Commercially available instruments. 

All require listening—carefully and with commitment—with both your eyes and your ears. You can contract the services of a consultant or your internal staff can carry out the audit. Determine the appropriate approach and components for your organization based on discussion with your team and prior experiences in your workplace. More damaged cultures may call for outside intervention, especially if the internal employees have little trust in their leaders. But even a positive culture may benefit from an outsider's outlook and observations. In every organization, it is possible to overlook important cultural components because you are too close to your situation.