Are today’s boards ill-equipped to deal with modern workplaces?
AICD COMPANY DIRECTORS
Dr. Laurence Lock Lee and Dr. Eileen Doyle
As scalps continue to fall in the banking Royal Commission, it’s become clear board members need tools to give insights and transparency into company culture. Boards need to be better technically equipped to deal with non-financial indicators like a poor or ineffective corporate culture. While we have technologies that can monitor financial and business process performance in real time, there are very few options available for the most critical non-financial indicators – like employee experience and corporate culture. This leaves organisations left to rely on tools such as big one-off deep dives or employee engagement surveys. These, at best, are conducted on an annual basis but usually much less frequently. They also run the risk of response biases, being backward looking and relying on reflection more so than the here and now. This lack of real-time indicators for the human side of organisational performance means boards are ill-equipped to deal with challenges in this domain.