A Better Culture Quotient

Ethisphere rolls out new changes to address the 3 biggest challenges around measuring culture.

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Survey fatigue, deeper insights, and a stronger business case for culture measurement are all driving substantial changes in the language that Ethisphere uses in its Culture Quotient surveys—including the launch of a new line of smaller, lighter pulse surveys.

by DOUG ALLEN | Vice President, Data Strategy, Ethisphere

For more than a decade, Ethisphere has helped companies measure their cultures through the Culture Quotient questionnaire, a 40-question deep dive into how employees view their culture. We have always focused on ensuring that how and what we measure is relevant, important, and up to date with broader E&C trends, regulatory guidance, and what our own customers tell us.

In that time, we have identified three key challenges facing organizations that want to measure their culture: survey fatigue, a desire for deeper data insights, and a need to make the business case for measurement. That is why, at the beginning of 2025, we rolled out substantial language changes in the Culture Quotient itself and launched a new line of shorter, 10-question pulse assessments to help organizations everywhere address these challenges.

What’s Staying the Same

Our measurement process still retains its foundation on the Eight Pillars of an Ethical Culture that we are known for, and that our customers really lean on to dissect and diagnose their own ethical culture. And we still leverage skip logic to ensure that what's asked of every respondent is relevant based upon their profile or their experience as an employee in the organization. But apart from that, we have looked at every single facet of the questions, structure, and format to figure out where folks might be getting confused or dropping out of the survey when they are taking it. The results of that research are reflected in our 2025 edition of the Culture Quotient.

Fighting Survey Fatigue

A key reason why we made some adjustments is that folks are struggling to get employees to engage in these types of surveys on account of what they're calling “survey fatigue.” So, we've developed not only refinements to make the survey taking process easier, but we are asking questions that get at what may be driving survey fatigue. The reality is that employees aren’t tired of taking surveys so much as they’re tired of taking surveys where there is no resulting action or changes being administered. They want to see the impact their participation has. And our own experience, as well as outside research, shows that employees would be willing to take frequent surveys if resulting action is evident from them participating. As it turns out, most companies don't have a survey fatigue problem. They have an under-actioning problem.

To get around this survey fatigue piece, we ask about the extent that the respondent believes their voice will be heard within this survey, and that action will result from it. We try to gauge the belief that action will come from the survey to get a metadata point directly tied to perception that change will occur. That’s not only a great proxy for measuring survey fatigue, but also for measuring confidence in the program and the compliance function in general.

We have also streamlined the questions themselves, since the Culture Quotient is now 40 questions in length. Now, many of the questions are more actionable, more clear, and more easily digestible for the respondent. It’s all part of our focus on how we can make this a more efficient process for the respondent.

Most companies don't have a survey fatigue problem. They have an under-actioning problem.

Giving Deeper Insights

Over the years, we have created partnerships with companies that have taken culture assessments several times, and at this stage in their program’s maturity, they are looking for deeper insights into how they can advance their culture.

We've added several new questions across the Eight Pillars, based on what we have learned. For example, we’ve added new depth and details to figure out the root cause behind why employees do or don’t report misconduct. We also offer a variety of new answer options to address what people consider to be key pieces of encouragement to report, such as support from their managers or from their peers.

These new questions allow us to go deeper into areas where our customers are always asking for more information, where they think we can become even more actionable in what we can advise and coach customers to do.

We are also going deeper into the employee's perspective on how the messaging from ethics and compliance is resonating, and how well they can recall the messaging itself. We really want to start measuring elements of not only perceptions of the program, willingness to speak up, and tone of the top and the middle, but also behaviors associated with that.

Ultimately, these things are all around getting a sense if your program is working or if it is effective in general. There is a triumvirate of inputs that are required to figure out is your program working. The first is the environment or the compliance program: What systems or processes are in place from the compliance team that dictate the compliance environment for the employee? The second is the perception of the local culture: What is the willingness of people to speak up, and why? That is really where our survey comes into play. And third is the behavioral component: What are the employees subject to, what are they feeling, and what are they actually doing?

From the behavioral standpoint, we've started interjecting questions that really get at what extent employees are receiving communications. Are they reporting? Are they engaging with their manager on the topic of speak up? If so, how frequently, and what is that experience like? We're trying to get that holistic view to help compliance leads figure out if their program is working in practice. That’s why some of the new questions and new answer options to existing questions get at that behavioral component.

These new questions allow us to go deeper into areas where our customers are always asking for more information.

Build the Business Case

Organizations with less mature ethics and compliance functions, or have senior leadership that does not yet see the value in culture measurement, need help in making the business case for it. To that end, we have developed a variety of more lightweight assessments that we call pulse assessments. We have a library of these topic-specific assessments available today, and they serve a variety of use cases. One is for less mature organizations, where a pilot program needs to be run, a 10-question temperature check might be more feasible than Ethisphere's full, 40-question dive into ethical culture. We can administer these quicker assessments to a targeted audience, which can help build the business case for why culture measurement is valuable, and how it can lead to some pretty dramatic and notable improvements in a way that's cost effective and efficient.

We also offer a library of topic-specific pulse templates that are appropriate for organizations that may do a full culture assessment every 18 to 24 months, but in the intervening time periods may wish to go deep into a certain area or for certain teams. Organizations can run these pulse surveys three, six, nine, or 12 months later to see if their intervening remediation efforts have been effective.

We're really excited about this new launch, and we've got a variety of topics available today. We've got pulse assessments specific to organizational justice, willingness to speak up against misconduct, and managing pressure. And, we’ve got one called Culture Essentials, which is essentially the full culture assessment distilled down to a very lightweight, quick 10-question version that allows nascent programs with limited leadership buy-in or willingness to partake in such an assessment to get a taste of what this can offer.

Some Final Thoughts

It is possible to run culture assessments with a standard set of questions that does not change. And while that provides a great deal of consistency, you lose the ability to adapt to an environment where practices and expectations change. That is why we have opted to approach culture measurement like we approach the World’s Most Ethical Companies process. We revise the Ethics Quotient process regularly to ensure that what we measure is up to date and reflective of best practices. The Culture Quotient was revised in that same spirit.

It’s important to note that the changes that we have made to our assessment this year does not come at the expense of any of our existing benchmarking data. We have been measuring culture for more than a decade and have more than 300 companies who have engaged with us. We've got some three and a half million employee results in hand from taking these assessments. We don't want to lose that that large, comparative data set, which is why the changes we have made are refinements to our language to make it more clear, but not at the expense of losing access to that great benchmarking context that we provide.

We’re quite excited to share our new Culture Quotient language with you. Through these changes we’re making sure that the Culture Quotient itself evolves, along with the larger trends driving culture issues. And most of all, we are confident that this updated language, along with our new pulse assessments, will solve for some of the challenges that come with culture measurement. ■

Doug Allen is the Vice President of Data Strategy at Ethisphere where he leads benchmarking, certification, and partnership efforts.

NEXT STEPS

If you are brand new to measuring culture, here are four great ways to learn more.

The Eight Pillars of Ethical Culture. This is a great primer on our culture measurement methodology and philosophy.

Masterclass Recordings. For more detail, check out these free, short courses on culture measurement that often include a partner company that shares their own culture measurement experience.

The Global Ethics Summit. We have a lot of great sessions planned on ethical culture coming up for Ethisphere’s annual marquee event on April 6-8 in Atlanta, GA.

Contact the Data & Services team. We'd love to share our insights with you as you explore this topic for yourself.

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