How culture surveys can drive meaningful change in safety and leadership culture

Organisational culture surveys are a powerful diagnostic tool that take the pulse of a workforce’s values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.

By measuring these elements, leaders gain the insights to effectively manage and target interventions to enhance workplace safety and leadership outcomes.

Organisational culture encompasses the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours that shape how employees perceive their workplace, behave, and identify with the organisation. Understanding the organisational culture directly influences a leader’s decisions, actions, and the organisation’s overall performance.

LDN has extensive experience partnering with organisations to design and deliver tailored organisational culture surveys. Our clients seek insights into their workplace culture to better understand their employees’ thoughts on areas such as safety and leadership values, behaviours, attitudes, the effectiveness of policies, systems, processes, and overall employee satisfaction, well-being, and morale.

Key areas where culture surveys help organisations gain insights

Understanding employee sentiment: Surveys gather a snapshot of how employees feel about your workplace, their levels of satisfaction, morale, perception of leadership and management, and any underlying issues affecting well-being. Leaders can then use these insights to implement targeted initiatives.

Identifying strengths and weaknesses: Understanding what your people believe are your organisation’s strengths and the areas needing improvement enables leaders to make informed decisions on planning, resource allocation and training and development.

Perceptions of organisational safety culture: Assessing whether employees believe that the organisation has the processes, systems, behaviours and safety culture in place to keep them safe at work. Understanding these perceptions allows leaders to address safety or leadership concerns.

Early warning signs: Your survey data can provide the leadership and management team with a credible early warning as to latent failures in their WHS Management Systems, or potential risks, enabling organisations to proactively manage and mitigate them to avoid serious incidents.

Improving communication and transparency: Surveys promote a culture of transparency and trust if employees know their feedback will be used to improve the work environment.

Driving organisational change: Surveys can provide the data needed to validate the need for strategic changes and initiatives. Leaders can use these insights to drive targeted interventions that align with organisational goals.

Feedback and suggestions: Surveys offer an effective way for employees to have their voice heard. Responses can be collected anonymously, which often results in more candid feedback. Surveys can also solicit creative ideas for continuous improvement and innovation.

Benchmarking against industry standards: Comparing survey results to industry standards and best practices helps set realistic goals and drive continuous improvement.

Ensuring due diligence: Surveys can provide crucial data for due diligence verification and audit frameworks, ensuring compliance with legislation, safety and leadership standards and helping avoid legal and regulatory issues.

LDN offers a comprehensive, cost-effective online culture survey service that provides data-driven insights into your organisation’s current safety and leadership culture.

Our process includes collaborating with clients to clarify the survey’s purpose, scope, and audience; survey design; technical setup; assistance with distributing and communicating the survey and data collection.

Once a survey is completed, we can either provide you with the raw insights data or analyse the data and deliver a report with actionable insights. We can also follow up with employee focus groups to gain deeper insights or run executive leadership workshops to help explain the results.

The data helps leaders identify and prioritise areas for improvement, plan future learning and development initiatives, training, and support evidence-based decision-making to create an action plan that moves the organisation towards its goals.

Furthermore, regularly conducting surveys and tracking your progress over time allows you to see if your interventions have worked and make necessary adjustments.