Culture & The Measurement Problem
Unlock dream data to level-up employee listening
Toxic cultures cost businesses billions
19% of employees work in a toxic culture. That means, every day, they are spending time somewhere that is disrespectful, non-inclusive, unethical, cutthroat, or abusive. Shockingly, this is an increase of 9 percentage points since 2022.
Businesses pay a high price when organizational cultures crumble. The Society of Human Resources Management estimate a turnover cost of $223 billion per year in the US alone. CEOs are painfully aware of this risk- more than 90% of North American leaders believe that improving their corporate culture would boost financial performance
For employees, a toxic organizational workplace can mean a 300% increased risk of depression and a 55% increase in physical ill-health. Their personal lives become severely disrupted, with far more incidences of domestic conflict. But most concerning, their risk of early death skyrockets- the World Health Organization estimates that every year 750 thousand people die as a result of toxic workplace cultures.
“Toxic workplaces drain all the energy and excitement out of employees and replace it with fear”– Mindy Shoss PhD
Surveys are failing to capture true employee experience
Responsible organizations take careful steps to measure their cultures on an ongoing basis, with the intention of identifying and intervening before toxicity sets in. For more than fifty years, employee surveys have been their chosen method. The field of employee surveys has exploded in recent years. Today these surveys have reached a high level of maturity. Questions are careful crafted and benchmarked by Organizational Psychologists, extensive analyses are conducted by highly skilled People Analytics Teams, and data collection approaches are optimised by AI.
However, despite the extensive effort, time, and financial investments organizations make in employee surveys, they are not satisfied with the outcomes. There is a growing awareness amongst business leaders that these surveys do not measure the experiences of employees with any degree of reliability or granularity.
Nowhere is this uncomfortable truth clearer than in survey data collected during the Covid pandemic. Since 2000, global employee engagement figures have been collected by Gallup. The percentage of employees who are fully engaged- that is, involved and enthusiastic about their workplace- typically hovers around 30%. In January of 2020, when employees were under unprecedented pressure from overwork, illness, and fear of job losses, this figure reached a historic high of 36%.
Faced with this reality, many organizations have turned to newer methods of measuring their culture. Behavioural tracking has doubled since 2020, today 60% of US & Europe organizations use it. Whilst these options might give a more accurate picture than surveys, the damage they do to organizational culture in the long-term is unsustainable. 59% of tracked employees said they felt pressure to work longer hours and 43% said it violates trust.
Employee dreams deliver a fresh perspective on culture
At the Centre for Organizational Dreaming we recognize that this trade-off, between leader’s visibility on culture, and the dignity and privacy of employees, is unnecessary. The rich data source of employees’ dreams provides an opportunity for truly human-centric measurement. It is a diagnostic approach that depends on, and strengthens, partnership between employers and employees.
“There is a magical mirror in this place we find ourselves while dreaming. It is a mirror capable of reflecting a profoundly honest picture of who we are rather than who we would like to think we are or who we would like others to think we are” – Montague Ullman
A growing body of scientific evidence is demonstrating that far from random neuronal firings, dreams contain deep insights about our perceptions and experiences of our waking lives. Insights that, with very little guidance, we can be trained to remember upon waking.
Most of us dream about our jobs 20% of the time, even after we retire. If we spend long hours at work, we’ll dream about it even more. When we’re stressed at the office, this colours the emotions of our dreams. A happy work-life means pleasant work-dreams.
Cutting-edge technology transforms dreams to organizational insights
Until recently, the use of employee dreams as data was logistically impossible. A single dream can take months to fully unpack, even with the support of a specialist psychotherapist. An organization of 100 000 employees couple produce more than a million dreams in a single week. Business leaders need constant and consistent visibility on the culture of their workplaces- a delay of months would be untenable.
The recent resurgence of interest in dream science as a genuinely inter-disciplinary field, coupled with huge strides in technology, is fast dissolving this hurdle. Psychologists, Data Scientists, Software Developers and HR Professionals are collaborating to build modern solutions to these challenge. For example, Maja Gutman Music utilized novel text analysis approaches to explore 25 million comparisons between reports and learn how shared events influence our dreams.
At the Centre for Organizational Dreaming we have developed cutting-edge tools that support the use of employee dreams as a data source. Our platform collects and analyses employee dreams with accuracy, theoretical grounding, and anonymity. It equips leaders to intuitively explore, and understand, the dreams of their organization.
