Organisations measure almost everything that matters to their health. Revenue, productivity, attrition, engagement and performance all find their way onto dashboards. Culture, despite being invoked as an explanation for everything from retention to transformation, remains considerably harder to pin down.
Sulbha Kaushal Rai, chief growth & transformation officer, RenewBuy, has an interesting analogy for that contradiction: culture is like breath.
“You measure your heart rate, you measure your blood, but you never measure your breath,” she observed at the HRKatha Inner Circle, held in partnership with Culturelytics. “And without breath, you’re not alive.”
For Rai, culture occupies a similar place inside an organisation. Its presence is fundamental, even when it is difficult to see or quantify.
That creates a particular problem for HR. Much of what the function understands about culture has traditionally been experienced through behaviour, conversations and observation. Yet when the same discussion moves into the boardroom, the language changes.
Founders and CEOs, Rai pointed out, understand the language of numbers.
That is why the possibility of measuring culture and connecting it with financial outcomes caught her attention. If something organisations have traditionally experienced as intangible can be translated into evidence, the conversation around culture could begin to change too.
The question is not whether numbers can capture every nuance of organisational life. It is whether measurement can help leaders understand something they already know matters, but have struggled to express in business terms.
At the HRKatha Inner Circle on the Culture–Performance Equation, Rai’s analogy captured that tension neatly. Culture may be as ever-present as breath. The challenge is finding a meaningful way to measure what has always been felt.
Watch Sulbha Kaushal Rai explain why culture may be an organisation’s most essential invisible force.