A 2004 Deloitte survey, titled "In the dark: What many boards and executives don't know about the health of their businesses," concluded that boards and executives need metrics on nonfinancial aspects of their companies' performance, including:

• Employee commitment 
• Customer satisfaction 
• Product/service quality
• Innovation
• Quality of relationships with external stakeholders

The survey also indicates that these same senior leaders find it difficult to get nonfinancial data or find the data they do get to be inadequate.

In December of 2006 and January 2007, Deloitte repeated the survey: "In the dark II: What many boards and executives STILL don't know about the health of their businesses." They tracked progress on the same nonfinancial metrics as in 2004. The 2007 research reflects an increasing level of interest in nonfinancial performance metrics within organizations. It also brings to light a clear gap between needs and current capabilities related to assessment tools for nonfinancial metrics. It is apparent that organizations will struggle to measure and interpret nonfinancial indicators until universal sector-specific standards on nonfinancial issues are established and reliable diagnostic tools are developed.

Additionally, one of the most important indicators of a company's overall health is still generally overlooked. The overriding influence on employee behavior, and ultimately a company's success, is the company's culture. Executives need to ask "Are employees living the stated values of the company or are unstated values driving behavior and perceptions?" The stated values are published and publicized but the unstated values actually being lived by the employees of a company create the greatest risk for an organization.

The salient questions related to organizational culture are: how do you measure culture? How do you identify the areas of a company that are at risk? How do you proceed to act on those areas?

To help address these questions, Working Values developed the Cultural Risk Assessment (CRA), an industry-leading Web-based values survey based on methodology developed by Richard Barrett & Associates.

The CRA makes it possible to translate soft qualitative data on values into quantitative data that can be reported internally and externally. It provides a base-line measurement instrument for monitoring changes in the organizational culture and provides a method for measuring the resources available to the organization to meet its integrity goals.

Two templates are used in the survey -- a personal values template to map the values important to employees in their lives, and an organizational values template for the values of the current and desired culture of the organization.

The values and behaviors employees bring to the workplace are assigned to one of seven levels. Each of these levels reflects a different individual dimension, and a dimension of the culture of the organization. By looking at both strengths and weaknesses in each category, the CRA determines where critical ethics and compliance behaviors that impact both reputation and performance may be lacking.

Following the values survey, workshops are held for senior leaders to review results. An action plan is developed to address and reduce cultural risks that affect the overall health of the organization.

Striking a balance with financial and nonfinancial measurements, as well as evaluating the culture of an organization, leaders can have a realistic view of the organizations total health upon which their long-term success relies.

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WORKING VALUES LTD. is a business ethics and training company. Through a variety of products and services, including Web-based compliance and ethics programs, on-site training, video and award-winning ethics games for employees, Working Values aims to align employee behavior with company values. For more information as to how Working Values can narrow your company's Behavior-Standards Gap, visit www.workingvalues.com or contact cgebler@workingvalues.com. For news on ethics in the workplace, visit SmartPros Ethics & Compliance.