1. Review your Impact Report every quarter

It’s good practice to look at your report each quarter. How does the team’s Impact Report compare to the report generated for the whole organization?

It’s likely that your ranking will change with each Culture Profile measure. Even if average scores are stable through time, the distribution of your scores could be different, and this unique profile of experiences is part of what determines where topics sit in relation to one another in the ranking table.

You can also expect that the Impact Report will differ depending on whether you are looking at team or organizational scores because every team has a microculture with its own set of strengths and opportunities for improvement.

2. Choose one topic with high potential to work on next

Analyze why you score the way you do. What positive and negative contributing factors explain your score? What is within your power to change? How easy would those changes be? How much do those changes get to the underlying causes of our experiences?

3. Make a plan

If you’d like to take action to improve a score ask yourselves: what should we start doing, stop doing and keep doing?

If you are in need of inspiration, then search the topic here in our Help Centre for ideas and tips, including things other organizations have tried.

It’s also worth reaching out to HR to ask if they can link you up with a team scoring well in the area you have identified. Some of the easiest ideas to adapt and implement come from those doing something different within a similar context. Then you get to see how they have overcome obstacles and constraints your team will also likely face.

4. Give yourselves time

It’s always great to leave a meeting with a plan, then you’ll need to implement it – as well as doing the day job! Expect it will take some time to embed new ways of working. For example, you may have identified a different way of running meetings or of giving feedback and these changes take a little time to become habits. And oftentimes it’s only when things feel established that we experience that aspect of our work differently – and score it differently.

This is why we say it’s better to identify one area of focus and commit to following through to implementation, rather than doing lots of things by halves. It’s easier to trace the relationship between effort and results when actions are focused and not diffuse.

5. Monitor your progress

Use data to make adjustments and tweaks to your plans in real-time.

If you have put in place a time-bound intervention (eg. a day of learning), then use the weekly happiness KPI to capture any changes to mood and morale that followed. Also, use the weekly trend line to monitor any unintended negative consequences of your initiatives.

If your initiative is not time-bound, then we suggest using the Improvement tab in your Reports Overview next quarter to check whether scores have risen, fallen or remained stable.

If scores have improved, that’s great – you have established happier ways of working! What made the biggest difference to you and the team?

If scores haven’t changed or they have fallen, it may be your adjustments have not had the impact you intended. Do things need time to embed? What has helped? What hasn’t helped? What’s the next best thing we can do to help?