According to my employer Gallup’s research, only 8% of employees strongly agree that their organization takes action on surveys. Thirty-eight percent say they don’t know if their organization takes any action at all. Just two out of ten strongly agree that they feel connected to their organization’s culture.
That’s the measurement problem: most organizations survey, then do nothing structurally. The scores become background noise. Leaders file the data, propose task forces, suggest better communication. Nothing changes.
What’s missing isn’t data. Organizations have plenty of scores, plenty of insights, plenty of analysis. What’s missing is the architecture that makes measurement consequential and the willingness to shift from episodic surveys to measurement embedded in the flow of work.
I explored with Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell Soup, why purpose requires making leaders deeply uncomfortable. The diagnosis was clear: purpose divorced from accountability becomes performance art
What Conant made equally clear in our conversation is that discomfort without measurement is just noise. The scorecards he built at Campbell didn’t just track culture.
They made culture unavoidable in the daily flow of work.
Conant arrived at Campbell in 2001 facing a company in crisis. Market cap had collapsed by half after years of cost-cutting that hollowed out trust. His experience at Nabisco and General Mills had taught him to recognize the pattern: culture initiatives that produced data without consequences.
At Campbell, he refused to repeat that failure. He made culture scores as consequential as quarterly earnings, then embedded the measurement into how work actually happened.
The results proved the approach worked. But what made measurement matter wasn’t the scores themselves, it was how Conant wove them into the fabric of daily work.
“The first thing we did,” Conant explained, “was create a scorecard with four quadrants that the board reviewed every quarter. Financials, marketplace dynamics, workplace health, strategic progress. All four. Equal weight.”
I’ve seen hundreds of scorecards. Most give culture a courtesy mention at the end. Conant’s approach puts workplace health alongside financials as a board-level metric with career consequences. “You can’t win in the marketplace until you create a win in the workplace,” he said. “As an operating principle, not a slogan.”
This was radical for 2001. Jack Welch wasn’t doing this. Most boards reviewed culture as an HR update, not a strategic imperative.
The scorecard forced a question most organizations avoid: if culture actually matters, why doesn’t it sit alongside revenue in how we evaluate leadership?
