One of the challenges leaders have today is being able to understand and manage their team culture. Working remotely and staged return to office initiatives have made this an important but difficult task. As they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast and culture is the precursor for performance.
It is our responsibility as leaders to have a possibility and visionary mindset and create a 2022 high-performing standard that proves that we can navigate through the current culture crisis and bounce back even stronger and more effectively.
So, the question is, how are you managing your team culture?
Whilst conducting employee engagement surveys can provide insights about employee needs and frustrations, and are a fairly low-cost and straightforward method, they're not as effective as some people deem them to be, particularly when compared to team culture diagnostic tools.
Engagement is only one of the 10 pillars of a High Performing Team.
Surveys require effort to analyse results and craft action plans in response, and companies run the risk of negatively impacting employee morale if they don't see a meaningful response to their feedback.
Engagement surveys have a specific purpose and are beneficial under certain circumstances. Although if you are serious about changing the performance you need to understand the team dynamics and more importantly the shortfalls.
A thoughtful combination of art and science
Team culture diagnostics are a better alternative and lack many of the flaws of team engagement surveys. In conjunction with Dr John Molineux, Performance Shift, an Australian corporate training and consulting company, has developed a proprietary High Performing Team (HPT) Diagnostic that is based on proven data science. Performance Shift's proprietary HPT diagnostic tool focuses on delivering results via quantitative measures and analysis across 10 high-performance levers.
Unlike an engagement survey, Performance Shift's diagnostic tool produces an actionable plan. After every team assessment, a comprehensive examination of each lever is carried out, and a unique team report is created, clearly outlining which levers provide the most improvement potential.
The data for each lever is presented and rated separately in the report, giving management a list of actionable priorities requiring the greatest attention. When this diagnostic is used to identify difficulties and growth possibilities, it directs management's time and investment into the areas with the maximum potential for the return on investment.
Through team assessment tools like Performance Shift's HPT, diagnostics is becoming the go-to tool for organisations that want to create meaningful change through customised programs for sustained improvement in performance.