Culture Survey Services
Find the culture problems your engagement survey is missing
Most employee surveys tell you whether people are engaged, satisfied, or likely to recommend the organization. A Leadership IQ Culture Survey goes after something harder to see: the contradictions that hide inside otherwise respectable scores.
We show you how your culture actually works and where it's getting in the way of the business.
Confidential. Reported by department and by manager, not just company-wide.
Leadership IQ research has appeared in
What you'll learn
The questions a culture survey can actually answer
These are the questions leadership teams bring us, and every one of them is measurable if the survey is designed to compare answers rather than rank them.
- Are employees telling you what they really think?
- Is accountability producing performance, or fear?
- Do employees understand the strategy but lack the authority, staffing, or processes to execute it?
- Are your strongest managers masking broader problems with senior leadership?
- Do the behaviors you say matter actually get rewarded?
- What unofficial rules have employees learned about who gets promoted and who gets listened to?
- Are your silos caused by competing goals, broken follow-through, or departments people would rather not deal with?
- Do ambitious goals create pressure to compromise standards?
- Do employees feel empowered, then discover they can't actually change anything?
- Are leaders held to the same standards as everyone else?
Accountability against candor, one department at a time. The company-wide gap was 0.53 points. By department it ran from −0.49 to +1.64. Read the full analysis
How it works
How the culture survey works
Three stages, and the third is the one that makes the results different from an engagement report.
We design the survey around what leadership actually needs answered
There's no reason to run a culture survey just to generate another dashboard. Before anything gets fielded, we work with you to understand the business problem behind the request, which is usually something concrete: a new strategy, unexpected turnover, decisions that take too long, cross-functional work that keeps stalling, high performers leaving, or a suspicion that people aren't saying what they think.
The survey then combines proven Leadership IQ items with questions written for your organization, and the pairs get chosen deliberately, because the comparisons are what produce the findings.
Employees complete a confidential online survey
The survey takes employees a few minutes and uses a seven-point response scale, which gives people room to distinguish between mild and firm agreement. That distinction matters, because most of these findings live in gaps of half a point to a point and a half.
Responses stay confidential. Individual answers are never shown to managers or executives, and results are only reported for groups large enough to protect people. At the same time the data keeps the department and manager information the analysis needs, since that's where the differences show up.
We analyze the relationships between answers
This is where the work stops resembling a traditional engagement report. We don't rank the questions from highest to lowest and hand you the bottom five. We compare answers against each other, at the individual level.
Then every one of those comparisons gets broken out by department and by manager, because company-wide averages routinely hide the largest differences inside an organization.
What you receive
What's in the engagement
A survey built for your organization, the analyses that need pairs of questions to work, and a leadership conversation about what the data says to do next.
A customized culture survey
Built around your strategy, your leadership team's concerns, and the questions you need answered, rather than an off-the-shelf list of generic engagement items.
Company-wide culture analysis
The major patterns across the organization, including the places where healthy-looking scores are covering something more serious.
Department and manager cuts
Where different parts of the organization are living in genuinely different cultures. This is where most of the actionable findings turn up.
Hidden-culture analyses
Depending on which questions you include: accountability versus fear, strategy execution, leadership credibility, values, psychological safety, empowerment, decision speed, advancement, and silos.
Executive findings and recommendations
What leadership needs to look into, which problems are concentrated in specific groups, and where the organization is most likely to get a real improvement.
An executive debrief with Mark Murphy
Mark reviews the findings with your leadership team, explains which patterns matter most, and lays out the questions the data says leadership needs to answer next.
An example
What a typical survey would have missed
One finding, start to finish, so you can see what the method produces.
In a recent analysis of 1,354 employees, the statement “My leader holds people accountable for their performance” scored 5.60 on a seven-point scale. A conventional engagement report would file that under strengths and move on to the weak items.
So we compared it against whether those same employees could raise a concern, report a serious problem, and expect problems to get solved rather than blamed. At the company level the gap between the two was almost nothing. Split up, it was a different picture entirely.
The same gap, three ways
- Company-wide0.53
- By department−0.49 to +1.64
- By manager−1.02 to +2.28
Accountability compared against each speaking-up item separately. The gap is 0.25 points on raising a concern with your own leader and 0.90 on whether problems get solved rather than blamed.
Ten managers combined an accountability score above the company average with a candor score below it. A company average of 0.53 gives a CEO nothing to act on. Ten named managers is a coaching agenda.
Is this you?
When organizations usually call us
Almost always because something doesn't add up.
If one of those sounds familiar, let's talk about what your culture survey should measure.
Why Leadership IQ
We've spent years studying what employee surveys miss
A culture problem usually doesn't show up as a low score. It shows up as a contradiction between two answers.
Leadership IQ has run employee surveys and organizational research across a wide range of organizations, and the work keeps coming back to the same place: the gap between what leaders intend and what employees actually experience. That gap is measurable, and it doesn't appear on an item ranking.
That's why we write questions in pairs, analyze responses at the individual level, and look hard at the differences between managers and between departments. You don't need another score telling you the culture is generally positive. You need to know where it breaks.
Before you ask
Questions we get about the culture survey
How customized is the survey?
It's tailored to what your leadership team needs to understand. We use Leadership IQ's existing item bank wherever it fits, and write additional questions when your strategy or your particular culture questions call for them. What matters most is that the items come in pairs that can be compared, because a survey assembled from individually interesting questions leaves you with a list of scores and no way to analyze them against each other.
Is the survey confidential?
Yes. Individual responses are never reported to managers or executives, and results are only analyzed in groups large enough to protect confidentiality. That's different from stripping out respondent identifiers altogether, which would make most of these analyses impossible, since they depend on knowing that the same person answered both questions in a pair.
How long does the survey take employees?
A few minutes. The exact length depends on how much gets customized for your organization, though we keep it short enough that completion isn't a burden and long enough to carry the matched pairs the analysis needs.
Can we compare departments and managers?
Yes, and you should. Some of the most important culture findings disappear completely at the company-wide level. In one recent analysis the accountability gap was 0.53 points for the company and 2.28 points under a single manager, which means the company number was an average of two opposite cultures.
Can this replace our engagement survey?
It can, because a culture survey can carry the traditional engagement measures alongside everything else: whether people would recommend the organization, whether they're inspired to give their best effort, how their manager is doing, and how proud they are to work there. Whether it should replace your engagement survey or run alongside it depends on what you already measure and how attached your leadership is to trending an existing score.
What happens after the survey closes?
We analyze the findings, identify the patterns that matter most, and Mark reviews them with your leadership team. The output isn't just a report of what the culture looks like. It's a short list of what to investigate, which groups the problems are concentrated in, and where you're most likely to see a real change.
Get started
Find out what your culture is hiding
If your engagement survey is giving you scores without explaining why the strategy is stuck, why people are leaving, or why two departments doing similar work operate so differently, a culture survey will give you a much clearer picture. Tell us what you're trying to learn.
Talk with us about a culture survey
We'll get back to you to talk through what your survey should measure.
We'll only use this to reply about your culture survey.
