Looking beneath the scores: What a strong Culture Assessment should really tell us
There is no shortage of tools claiming to measure organisational culture. Many generate clear scores, benchmarks, and comparisons. Far fewer take the step of checking whether the questions behind those numbers genuinely reflect how culture is experienced in practice.
At FidesOak®, culture is understood as a system of connected dynamics rather than a set of isolated behaviours. That belief shapes how the High Performing Teams Assessment is designed and how it continues to be tested.
Organisational culture is lived through everyday interactions, decisions, and behaviours. Leadership, trust, communication, prioritisation, and team dynamics influence one another continuously. When assessments treat these elements as separate topics, the result can be a set of scores that describe what is happening but offer limited insight into why it is happening.
To explore this more deeply, we examined how responses within the High Performing Teams Assessment group together and what underlying patterns sit beneath them. This type of exploratory analysis makes it possible to test whether questions intended to measure related aspects of culture genuinely do so, while ensuring that distinct themes remain distinct. It also helps identify unnecessary overlap and confirms that the assessment focuses on what really matters.
What this analysis revealed was reassuring. The High Performing Teams Assessment holds together well as a measure of organisational culture. The way questions connect reflects real cultural dynamics rather than artificial groupings or isolated behaviours. This gives greater confidence that the assessment is capturing how culture is actually experienced across teams and organisations.
More importantly, it allows conversations to move beyond headline scores. Rather than stopping at what the numbers say, it becomes possible to explore what is driving them. Patterns emerge that help distinguish between root causes and symptoms, supporting clearer thinking about where attention and effort will have the greatest impact.
This is where the value of a strong culture diagnostic sits. Not in generating more data, but in creating clarity. By testing how assessment questions work together, the High Performing Teams Assessment functions as a diagnostic tool rather than a simple measurement exercise. It supports more focused conversations, better prioritisation, and decisions grounded in how culture operates day to day.
This work sits within FidesOak®’s wider approach to Assessment, Measurement, and Profiling, ensuring that insight leads to understanding, and understanding leads to meaningful action.
At FidesOak®, this reflects a simple principle. Good diagnostics should help organisations make sense of culture as it is lived, not just measured.
Author: Louisa Howard, Assessment and Measurement Specialist at FidesOak®
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