How KPI Tracking Can Strengthen Your Company Culture

Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) has long been a standard business practice for monitoring and improving employee performance. However, KPI tracking can also be a tool for improving an organization’s “company culture.”

As noted by Builtin, “a winning corporate culture has been shown to improve levels of employee engagement, productivity and performance.” Specifically, Builtin states that companies with the best culture enjoy “72% higher employee engagement ratings” than companies with weaker cultures.

So, how can KPI tracking be used to help improve your company culture and drive employee performance? Which company culture metrics should your business track? What are some of the best ways to use business KPIs to improve corporate culture?

How KPI tracking can strengthen company culture

There are a couple of ways to use KPI tracking to strengthen company culture. One method is setting business and employee KPIs that push employees to achieve excellence—creating a corporate culture that emphasizes personal achievement and results.

Another method is to track cultural KPIs in the organization to measure the strength of the company’s culture. Using the data collected on these business culture KPIs, organizations can then make changes that help to reinforce their company culture.

9 company culture metrics to track

So, which key performance metrics should an organization track to boost company culture? The specific employee and business KPIs tracked will vary depending on the organization’s industry, goals, and business model.

Some KPI examples that can be used to either enhance corporate culture or track an organization’s existing culture include:

Team-specific KPI examples

When trying to create a culture of excellence, many businesses focus on team or role-specific KPIs, creating KPI dashboards that display the achievements of various team members to help encourage some healthy competition and drive results. Examples of employee KPIs that can help drive corporate culture include:

• Sales activity KPIs. Sales team members may be tracked on how many prospect calls they make, the number of emails they send, and other sales activity KPIs that measure how frequently they engage with leads. This helps to encourage active participation by sales team members.
  
  
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics. Service team members may be assessed based on how well they’re matching the obligations set forth in the company’s SLAs. While it’s important to have strong SLAs to satisfy customers, they also need to be realistic based on the service team’s capabilities and resources. If the service team is struggling to keep up with an aggressive SLA, it may be necessary to adjust those goals or tweak the service team’s resources to keep them aggressive, but achievable.
  
  
• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). How many customers are on recurring services that bill monthly? How well is the sales team pushing MRR services? How good of a job is the service team doing at keeping customers who are subscribed to MRR services? Having a strong MRR is a great measure of a company with an excellent corporate culture that drives both sales and service teams to succeed.
  
  
• Service tickets closed. How many customer service requests does the service team close each day, week, or month? This metric can serve as a decent indicator of how effective and efficient the service team is at helping clients/customers with their issues.
  
  
• Customer satisfaction. How happy are customers with the service they’re getting? Tracking customer satisfaction is important for gauging how well expectations are being met and whether employees are going above and beyond to provide satisfactory solutions.
  
  

Company culture KPI examples

Aside from tracking individual and team performance metrics, it’s also important to track whether the company’s culture is impacting employees in a positive or negative manner—and to make adjustments as needed. So, it may be important to track company culture metrics such as:

• Overall Employee Engagement. How engaged are employees at work? As noted by Gallup, in the U.S., the percentage of “engaged” employees, “those who are highly involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace,” is roughly 36% of all workers. Meanwhile, 13% of workers are “actively disengaged,” meaning they are miserable at work and may try to sabotage their employer’s efforts. The remaining 51% of workers lack strong feelings either way. A strong company culture helps encourage more employees to be engaged with their work and trying hard to meet or beat their goals, while preventing the creation of disengaged employees who harm the company’s efforts.
  
  
• Voluntary Employee Turnover. Not every employee who is thinking about quitting will report so if asked. They may not answer honestly in employee engagement surveys about how satisfied they are with their work (especially if they’re concerned about getting fired for a negative review). Looking at voluntary employee turnover statistics can help employers discover how effective their company culture is at retaining employees—and whether they need to make changes to prevent high employee attrition.
  
  
• Utilization Rate. How effectively do employees use their time at work? Employees who are satisfied with their work and the company’s culture are more likely to spend their time efficiently than those who are dissatisfied. Taking an employee’s hours worked on client tasks and dividing that by their total hours worked, it is possible to see how efficiently they were spending their time. So, a high utilization rate is often desirable—though it’s important to avoid burning out employees through overutilization.
  
  
• Employee Burnout Rate. A strong indicator of a negative corporate culture is the “burnout rate” of employees in the organization. According to Gallup, employees with high burnout “are 63% more likely to take a sick day, 13% less in their performance and 23% more likely to visit the emergency room.” Gallup’s article also noted that the rate of burnout among employees who work from home all the time has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic began, going from 18% on average to 29% on average.
  
  

Best practices for improving your company culture through KPI tracking

So, how can your organization use KPI tracking to improve company culture? Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Use company culture metrics to identify critical issues and fix them

This may be easier said than done, but actually tracking company culture KPIs and using them to identify critical issues impacting employee performance and engagement at work can be a crucial step in improving corporate culture.

For example, if employee churn (and especially voluntary turnover) is high, investigate the causes of the churn to identify potential problems. This could be something like unsatisfactory work conditions, a lack of advancement opportunities, or even a toxic manager/employee driving away good workers. Finding and fixing the source of the issue is crucial for improving company culture.

2. Collect anonymous feedback from employees to fuel company culture KPIs

Tracking metrics like employee satisfaction and engagement requires polling employees through workplace surveys and similar data collection tools to get feedback from them directly. However, employees need to know that their feedback will not be used against them during evaluations. Otherwise, they may sugar-coat their problems—which defeats the purpose of collecting feedback.

Anonymous surveys can help ensure that employees feel more comfortable sharing both positive and negative experiences from their work environment. This, in turn, makes it easier to identify potential issues and fix them.

3. Create public KPI dashboards to encourage competition

Creating KPI dashboards to display employee performance metrics and sharing them where everyone can see can be a great way to encourage some competitiveness amongst employees. With public data dashboards, employees can see how they’re performing compared to others in the company—which can help motivate them to outdo their peers.

This helps to create a corporate culture where excellence is encouraged. Additionally, publicly recognizing top achievers and rewarding their efforts can provide further incentive for others to perform.

4. Have top performers coach their coworkers

If there is an employee who is consistently outperforming their peers, then it can be helpful to have them share their strategies for success with their coworkers. This helps to encourage a corporate culture where employees share knowledge and work to support one another. Additionally, it helps spread top strategies for success throughout the organization.

Using employee KPI data to identify these top performers can be a must for ensuring future success.

Are you ready to transform your company culture with KPI tracking? Reach out to BrightGauge today to learn more about how you can leverage data dashboards and performance metrics to create a strong company culture!