Plexus’ Organizational Culture Explorer is an internet-based survey that your higher education institution can use to analyze and measure the forces that influence your organization’s unique culture. If your goal is a culture that enables and sustains high quality performance, understanding the dynamics of your current environment provides you a roadmap that can direct you to the destination you seek.
Description
Plexus’ innovative Organizational Culture Explorer invites your faculty, staff, and administrators to rate how much they agree or disagree with a series of statements on 15 dimensions of organizational culture.
Respondents are guaranteed total confidentiality when they answer — even knowing that the survey is not hosted on their own institution’s website reassures them that they are free to answer frankly. The results reveal how much agreement exists on each dimension, and whether there are significant differences among sub-groups of employees.
The Organizational Culture Analysis feedback report also provides you with comparative results — for other anonymous higher education institutions that have used the Organizational Culture Explorer. These comparisons allow you to identify where factors of your culture outshine similar aspects in your competitors, and also spotlight
Organizational culture is complex and difficult to change. The Organizational Culture Explorer quickly and unobtrusively surveys your current employees and provides you, from their collective perspectives, a profile of your organization’s current culture. With it you can target specific areas for change and judiciously invest your efforts and resources to improve the culture that underlies your institution’s performance.
Target Audience
This assessment will be valuable for your institution if…
- Your institution pictures itself embodying quality principles and behaviors, but its current reality doesn’t match its vision.
- You have been striving for some time to change your institutional culture, but are uncertain where and how changes are taking hold.
- You find culture too broad and vague a concept to attack effectively, but breaking it down into more actionable elements would engage and empower people.
- You’ve seen worthwhile projects that your institution has undertaken fail because its employees can’t think and work together as effectively as they should.
- You would value having measures specific enough to create an institutional dashboard plotting cultural changes that align with your goals.
- Your leaders see so many different factors concerning institutional culture needing attention that they can’t decide where to begin.
- Feedback from morale and climate surveys tell whether employees are happy or miserable, but don’t indicate the underlying forces that cause their feelings.
- Everyone realizes that doing nothing will let the current culture and its problems become more entrenched and even more difficult to modify in the future.
Scheduling
Your employees can take the Organizational Culture Explorer at any time from home, work, or any place they can access a computer. Generally, institutions ask Plexus to make the survey available for one week to 10 days, but you can adjust its beginning and end time to suit your particular calendar and needs. Many employees can finish the survey in 10-15 minutes, or longer if they take the opportunity it offers for them to comment and explain their judgments.
We will provide you with templates for invitations you can send employees explaining the survey and its goals. You can customize these to fit your needs, but we are eager to help you get the maximum response to ensure that your results accurately reveal the culture your people experience at work.
In addition to the Organizational Culture Analysis feedback report you will receive within two weeks of the close of the survey, Plexus can also assign an expert in organizational culture and change to craft an Organizational Culture Digest, giving you a concise synopsis of the survey’s unique institutional results and customized recommendations for action. Or you can schedule a Quality Culture Consultation, where an expert comes to campus and leads whatever groups you wish through an analysis of the results and the creation of an institutional action plan for molding the organization culture you desire.
Areas Covered
The Organizational Culture Explorer presents 60 statements relating to 15 different critical institutional dimensions of culture, each of which research indicates is highly desirable in any organization striving for high productivity, innovation, and success. The results let you pinpoint the dimensions on which your institution is stronger or weaker than others. Repeated administrations of the survey let you chart changes in your institution’s culture. The 15 dimensions it measures and reports are:
Culture Management – the extent to which the institution actively and deliberately strives to shape the culture it wants through conscious, intentional actions.
Disposition toward Change- the degree to which employees are creative and innovative, and constantly search for better ways of getting their jobs done.
Employee Participation – the extent to which employees participate in the decision-making processes of the institution.
Goal Clarity – the degree to which the institution creates clear objectives and performance expectations.
Human Resources Orientation – the extent to which the institution has a high regard for its human resources.
Identification with the Institution – the degree to which employees identify with the institution.
Institution Focus – the extent to which the institution concentrates on those activities that constitute the fundamentals of its business.
Institution Integration – the degree to which the parts of the institution operate in a coordinated way by co-operating effectively towards the achievement of overall institutional objectives.
Locus of Authority – the degree of responsibility, freedom and, independence that individual employees have.
Management Style – the degree to which managers provide clear communication, assistance, and support to their subordinates.
Performance Orientation – the extent to which individuals are held accountable for clearly defined results and a high level of performance.
Reward Orientation – the degree to which performance determines recognition and rewards.
Stakeholder Orientation – the extent to which the institution seriously seeks out and actively responds to the views of its students and stakeholders.
Task Structure – the degree to which rules, regulations, and direct supervision are applied to manage employee behavior.
The Organizational Culture Analysis provides results for each question in the Explorer, but also summarizes the results in these 15 strategic dimensions. Results are broken down by employee demographics (role, full- or part-time status, and length of service) and verbatim comments (with identities protected) to let you better see how your current policies, practices, and processes may affect or contribute to your culture.
To view the a sample of the Organizational Culture Explorer online — the way your institution’s faculty, staff, and administrators will see it when they complete it — go to Sample Demonstration.
Applications
Any institution can use the Organizational Culture Explorer to chart changes in the dynamics that create that institution’s culture. If an institution wants to see out how changes in policies, workforce, operations, or other factors may affect organizational culture, the Organizational Culture Explorer gives them a needed tool. Others may simply want to know how their organization, compared with peers and competitors, “measures up” in cultural terms.
An important advantage of the Organizational Culture Explorer is its ability to let you pinpoint the factors in your organization that may be contributing to its culture, and then create and implement action plans to build on strengths as you seek improvement. Because the Explorer provides you with comparative information about other organizations’ scores on each dimension, you can see clearly where similar organizations have achieved better results than you – clear evidence of gaps in your performance that can close with will and sustained hard work. That others could do so is proof that you can too.
Download a concise two-page information sheet about the Organizational Culture Explorer and the value of assessing your institution’s culture at http://www.plexusintl.com/pdf/OCE_Information.pdf
