Culture has become both a buzzword and something of a nirvana. Everyone from management theorists to military generals to CEOs are asking culture to do everything from drive diversity and inclusion, create growth, improve safety, efficiency and, maybe most of all, generate innovation.
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How we get culture wrong
While culture is lionized and supposedly “eats strategy for breakfast”, the emphasis seems to be on measuring it via employee surveys. The thinking is you can’t improve what you don’t measure.  So ask your employees how you’re doing culturally, then construct a plan to address any issues. Simple and easy, right?
The problem is conventional wisdom only addresses half of the cultural challenge. Culture is ultimately an output and outcome, a lagging indicator of many individual and management decisions, actions, and even words that all add up to that nebulous thing we call culture.Â
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What we need to measure
If the goal is to change and improve the culture, then we need to measure, incent, and improve the inputs and leading indicators that produce culture. That requires answering two seemingly obvious questions: “What culture do we want?” and “What are the behaviors that produce the culture that we want?”
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How and what we measure at Duquesne Light
Here at Duquesne Light we believe culture and innovation are inseparable. Therefore, we seek a culture where everyone is empowered and enabled to innovate. We want a culture where innovation is a part of how we safely achieve our goals, serve our customers and community, and shape our future.
These are more than just platitudes or words. We have developed metrics that indicate whether we are progressing toward these goals, and we update these measurements quarterly. In particular, diversity, equity, and inclusion are core parts of how we achieve our mission (see “everyone is empowered and enabled”). So we measure diversity in many ways: from the diversity of our innovation project portfolio — whether that portfolio is touching our diverse organizational objectives; from affordability to sustainability; and the diversity of people, teams and departments leading our efforts.
Other key culture metrics include our innovation “footprint”: The number of total employee touchpoints with innovation in a given quarter, particularly the percentage of those touchpoints who are “new” (people whom innovation has not yet touched). To ensure our culture is open to new ideas and people, we measure the touchpoints we have with external third parties, and the diversity of those partners. Finally, all of these metrics are linked intrinsically to our overall corporate efforts – like our supplier diversity program or our ever-increasing efforts to hire diverse talent – outside of innovation’s direct “mandate” but critical to achieving the innovative culture we seek.
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Culture: You improve what you measure
In short, measuring your culture via employee surveys is necessary and important. But it is only part of the story. It is true that companies will “get what they measure” as it relates to culture. However, that is exactly the reason why we need to identify and measure the inputs and leading indicators that generate the culture we seek. The best historical innovations – like spears for ancient hunter-gathering cultures, the printing press for an increasingly literate population, or the telephone for a rapidly globalizing 19th century world – serve the emerging needs of a culture.Â
Therefore, to drive a more innovative culture, first define the culture you seek, identify the inputs necessary to generate that culture, and then measure those inputs rigorously and regularly. At Duquesne Light, our culture is a work in progress but being strategic about what and how we measure gives us confidence we are moving in the right direction.