meauring organisational health

The following was in answer to a question posted to the AFN email list. Several people liked it so I thought I share it more widely.

"I'm a bit obsessed with measurement at the moment so here's my 2 cents. Depending on what you mean by "health & wellness" (physical, mental, emotional, social), you have a whole range of options.

They probably fall into four buckets:
- Existing operational HR data (as noted by Belinda) - staff retention, sick days,
- Direct surveys aimed at aggregating individual experiences (as noted by Belinda, Hans & Cory) such as staff satisfaction & the human synergistics stuff.
- Direct surveys aimed mapping connections between individuals (social network analysis) - see here for an example: http://www.robcross.org/pdf/roundtable/energy_and_innovation.pdf
- Indirect surveys using narrative (as noted by Mary Alice). These can either be done using F2F workshops or online software. This can yield both qualitative & quantitative insights.

A fifth area might be some kind of ethnographic research (i.e. getting stuck in there and having a look around) - but this yields qualitative rather than quantitative insights.

You probably want some combination of the above depending on the organisation's:
- Budget
- Culture
- Previous experiences with these approaches."

i wear a bowler hat and drink tea

Curtis Conley discusses individualist vs communitarian approaches to KM. This kind of cross-cultural analysis is based on the work of Geert Hofstede and Fons Trompenaars & Charles Hampden-Turner. The more I am exposed to these tools, the more they remind me of MBTI and HBD approaches in personality typing - a useful place to start but a terrible place to finish.

Basically your behaviour is rated using a survey instrument. I remember taking a survey based on Hofstede's work and coming out looking pretty English. The cross-cultural stuff then underlies a lot corporate training in multinationals where as the personality stuff is often used in the service of teambuilding. If facilitated with a lightness of touch and a respect for people's experiences this can lead to a useful discussion on difference and diversity.

The problem occurs when you take this stuff too seriously. At the personality level, knowing my MBTI score will not allow you to predict my future behaviour. At the cross-cultural level, a lot of diversity training tends to get mired in stereotypes: we English don't express ourselves, Americans are loud, Japanese people are submissive. Now most stereotypes have an element of truth in them but they do not have predictive power. There are quiet Americans and loud Japanese people.

I think we are still at the stage where the acknowledgement of difference has use but I suspect these tools will lose whatever power they have over time. I hope we will outgrow them.