{"id":765,"date":"2015-07-16T09:00:32","date_gmt":"2015-07-16T13:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/annelitwin.com\/?p=765"},"modified":"2015-07-16T09:00:32","modified_gmt":"2015-07-16T13:00:32","slug":"assessment-methods-to-improve-organizational-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/blog-posts\/assessment-methods-to-improve-organizational-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Assessment Methods to Improve Organizational Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[Three common assessment methods can be used to collect data\u00a0from the community of women, and eventually from the broader\u00a0employee population, to begin to describe the organization\u2019s culture:\u00a0questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups. Questionnaires can give\u00a0a big picture of employee attitudes and beliefs, descriptions of and\u00a0satisfaction with organizational norms and values, and management\u00a0practices and policies related to systems of accountability, reward, and\u00a0decision making. Interviews can give more in-depth information about\u00a0these same areas, and focus groups can generate a conversation among\u00a0groups of women that both raises their awareness and provides a rich\u00a0description of the conditions that help or hinder our relationships.\nUsing any two or all three of these methods can provide the data\u00a0with which to build a good case for studying and changing policies\u00a0and practices in the organization. Usually, no one in the organization\u00a0has the whole picture of how the policies and practices, which tend to\u00a0evolve in a piecemeal fashion over many years, are interacting to affect\u00a0groups of people differently. These policies and practices almost always\u00a0reflect the masculine workplace values I described in chapter 1. For example, in the context of a focus group in a client organization,\u00a0women were able to share their stories about being reprimanded and\u00a0denied promotions because they managed their projects using feminine\u00a0workplace values of collaboration and team focus. They were told they\u00a0needed to demonstrate more leadership decisiveness by not \u201cwasting\u00a0time\u201d consulting their teams. These stories became the data that helped\u00a0make a case for engaging the whole organization in a dialogue around\u00a0the need to examine the assumptions behind the masculine workplace\u00a0values that got rewarded in order to change these policies and practices.\nIn an example of a discriminatory policy mess, a focus group in\u00a0another client organization brought together the stories of individual\u00a0women, who did not previously know each other. It became clear that\u00a0policies against part-time work and against working from home had\u00a0a differential impact on new mothers. (New fathers were afraid to\u00a0consider even asking to work from home.) The policy said that since\u00a0part-time employment was not allowed, new mothers could work\u00a0from home part-time but were expected to work the rest of the time\u00a0in the office to put in full-time hours\u2014but they could get paid only\u00a0for the time they were in the office since working from home did not\u00a0count as official work time. So they worked full-time but only got\u00a0part-time pay. The policymakers quickly realized, when they saw the\u00a0results from the focus groups, that this was not a good policy, and\u00a0was also probably not legal. The implications of this combination\u00a0of policies had not been visible to them before the women\u2019s stories\u00a0were collected in focus groups. With the use of these data-collection\u00a0methods, perceptions of unfair policies and practices can be brought\u00a0to the surface and combined to make the case for change in a way\u00a0that one voice or one story cannot.\n&nbsp;\nAn excerpt from my book,\u00a0<em>New Rules for Women<\/em>, available at Amazon (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0982056982\/<\/a>).]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\t<![CDATA[]]>\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[38,115,116,207,221,225,418,567,634],"class_list":["post-765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","category-excerpt","tag-assessment","tag-community","tag-competition","tag-feminine-values","tag-friendship","tag-gender","tag-new-rules","tag-teamwork","tag-workplace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}