Workplace Experience Ranking 2017: How Does It Work?

A lot of startups talk about their culture and use it to attract the right talent, yet a very few companies know what comprises of their culture. Most of the founders give you a half-baked definition, which comes from their own understanding of their organization's "culture". There is nothing wrong in it but it surely is not the entire perspective as there are other organizational stakeholders that form the said "culture". Employees have another perspective and their opinion is important, as they are the consumers of the "culture" that founders create in their organizations. After all, this is the base, among other factors, with which founders attracted employees to leave their plush corporate jobs and join their startup.

Overall, it's the experiences, which employees go through, become critical in determining whether an employee would leave the startup or continue. Moreover, these experiences determine whether employees will invite others in their network to join the great story they are part of. It takes more than swanky office, fancy cafeteria, and motivational quotes on the company walls to be able to brag about the employees' experience.

Workplace experience, unlike a feeling or emotions, can be quantified as a success metric. At Culturro, we have developed a robust, unique proprietary methodology to calculate the workplace experience score of any organization. We measure 10 parameters that holistically represent the workplace experience in any organization. These parameters are aligned with an employee's professional needs from a workplace

1.    Enablement - The most basic need of any employee is to have the right tools and resources to carry out his job/tasks well. Enabling employees with right resources is a necessity, which if unmet leads to an unproductive workplace experience

2.    Communication - Employees constantly rely on communication across leadership, peers, and subordinates to get the work done. Access to open, reliable and timely communication is a basic but crucial need for any employee which if unmet leads to chaos and confusion in a workplace

3.    Organizational Alignment - Organization's mission, vision and value system are like the North Star, which help employees have a sense of purpose and take decisions that are in tune with the strategic objectives. A misalignment in this can make an employee feel lost and lead to out of sync decisions

4.    Ownership - Most employees have an inherent need for responsibility. Every organization needs to provide an environment, where employee can take ownership without fear and feel responsible for results above and beyond their realm of work

5.    Wellbeing - Employee wellbeing is a major factor contributing to long-term engagement. An organization should to provide an environment that is considerate about its employees' physical and mental wellbeing to keep them motivated at the workplace

6.   Agility - Employees need a nimble environment to adapt to constantly changing variables at a workplace in order to make quicker decisions. Growth phase startups inherently need to have an agile mindset or else its workforce will not be able to adapt to changing conditions

7.    Performance Focus - Employees typically strive to make winning a habit in his/her career and constantly raise the bar for achievement. But this is not possible till an organization has a performance focus to keep challenging its employees to perform better

8.    Growth & Development - Growing career trajectory is an important need for any employee. An exponential growth curve is what most employees want to achieve in a career span and organizations should invest in their career development to help achieve the desired growth

9.    Innovation - After achieving excellence in their routine work scope, employees are constantly trying to create something new or do something differently. Organizations should have an innovation ideology and give its employees an opportunity to innovate or else they will lose interest in their work responsibilities

10.   Developing Leaders - Most employees are driven to move up the ladder and assume leadership responsibilities. An organization should focus on developing torchbearers within its own ranks

To know more about in detail read Workplace Experience Hierarchy of Needs

Hence, for Workplace Experience Ranking, to assess the quality of experiences created by the founders, we go to the consumers of workplace experience i.e. the employees. We ask employees about their experience across these 10 parameters. The employee feedback is collected through a digital survey ensuring complete anonymity of employees. The employee feedback is fed into Culturro's proprietary model to calculate the overall Workplace Experience score that will be used for the ranking. On participating you will receive a short report that not only gives you an understanding on where your startup stands on the Workplace Experience scale but also gives you a comparative view within your industry.