The Culture Platform

The Culture Platform was founded on the belief that at the core of every successful organization is a cohesive internal culture that empowers its members by forging meaningful connections within and across teams and their leaders.

Taking on the challenge of building strong organizational culture meant providing leaders and their teams with the right set of tools to get it done.  While culture itself might seem like a difficult thing to nail down in the first place, the set of shared values and motivations built by and supported from within a team continue to be the bedrock that strong teams and organizations are built on.  

Design Approach

In the real world, however, the reason that discussion and dialogue around culture remains complex is because organizations and teams are themselves complex, and each team has a unique set of cultural values.

The Culture Platform research team had developed a detailed and data-driven methodology to analyze cultural values in teams that formed the foundation of their value offering.  The initial challenge for us was to figure out how to display these complex metrics in a way that was both easy to understand and communicative of the fact that users could affect real change in their teams and organizations.

When we reached out to real team leaders in exploratory research for these prescriptive improvement tools, we listened to discussions and feedback around team and culture-building and distilled this feedback into 3 questions that team leaders wanted answered: "how am I doing?", "am I getting better?", and "how can I get better from here?"

In order to design and build the tools for organizations to prosper, we started with an initial approach of simplifying the way in which we communicate the answers to these 3 questions and to complex cultural values at large.

Dashboard

First, we developed an easy-to-read top-level score that condenses the independent dimensions of various cultural components into a single value.  This overall score is normalized from 0 to 100, and features a variable weighting system internally, allowing the platform to continuously calibrate and adjust as new data comes in, without distracting the end users with the technical mechanisms.  We modeled the visual components after a car speedometer, adding simple color-coded visual cues here and throughout the app to further reinforce easy readability: red for low scores, yellow for middling scores, and green-blue for high scores.

In the same view, we give a quick summary of historical data for the last 4 quarters in graph form as an intuitive means to show users their progress and change over time.  While the main score represents an adaptive snapshot of where a team stands at the current moment in time, this graph communicates the trends of where their team culture is headed, and where it's been in the recent past.  We again reuse the simple 3-color visual cues here so users can see at a glance where they stood at each segment in time.

Further down on the same page, we also searched for a way to simplify the breakdown of the various sub-dimensions that feed into the main score.  Building on the speedometer motif, we represent each dimension within a smaller, circular speedometer.

Survey

The Culture Platform is built upon the strong belief that robust measurement is always the first step of continuous improvement, and as a result, data collection lives at the core of the platform's offering.  To facilitate this data collection process, we designed and implemented a minimal survey experience that prioritizes clear communication and a distraction free user experience.  The survey experience is built upon a 5 point Likert scale, highlighting the feeling of progress and brevity with an animated progress bar stretching across the top of the page.  

We wanted the data collection process to be as frictionless as possible to increase the amount of data that went into the system, so we also built out responsive mobile layouts to allow surveys to be taken on any device.