The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 23. Using Cultural Survey Data

Most scaled companies run a periodic survey that asks questions about the experience of working in the company, collaborating across teams, compensation, and so on. The results are tallied together, reports are generated for each manager about their team, and executives get a report about the company overall. These are often called cultural surveys. There are a variety of vendors willing to sell you a solution like CultureAmp or Lattice, and occasionally you’ll see companies build their own tool in-house.

Relative to most other running-the-business responsibilities, senior leaders often don’t spend too much time on cultural survey results, but they’re a great lens into their data literacy and how they prioritize limited resources to address a very broad problem space. This is just as true of your existing executive team—and even you—as it is of potential hires, and they’re a valuable mechanism for earning credibility with your team by following through to address their concerns.

In this chapter, we’ll work through:

• Reading survey results

• Taking action on survey data

• Whether to modify survey questions

• When to start and how frequently to run

Even if you haven’t run a cultural survey before, by the end of this chapter you’ll have a good grasp on how to take advantage of this sort of data.

Reading Results

My quick advice for effectively reviewing survey data is:

• Spend a couple hours digesting the results.

• Focus more on absolute scores than ...