(3 of 4)
Daily thinks a real analysis of the DNA of a company's culture requires a deeper, wider view. RoundPegg believes culture can be measured using surveys to get at the beliefs and attitudes of individual employees. If corporations are people, as a certain presidential candidate once declared, then that's equally true of corporate culture. "Every interaction with a colleague--from the person manning the front desk to the person sweeping floors to the CEO ... all that behavior starts to paint a picture of what it's like to work there," says Daily. RoundPegg's methods also allow it to identify subcultures; if you're working in accounts receivable, the management style of the communications chief is less relevant to you.
That's not to say the scooters don't matter but merely that they're "artifacts of culture," says Daily, rather than the culture itself. "We're also a technology company," he concedes, "and we've got the requisite foosball table. But I'd say our core values are sharing information, creativity and high performance." And he measures each of those, just as eHarmony measures the various traits it thinks matter in a romantic partnership: things like conflict-resolution style, altruism and autonomy.
Even in this problem-within-the-problem of measuring corporate culture, RoundPegg has its share of competitors. A startup called Good.co emerges from beta soon and claims expertise in a particularly vexing segment of the labor market: millennials--those born in the '80s or '90s who are entering the workforce en masse. Churn is more of an issue among this cohort, according to HR groups. Perhaps that's because of an essential narcissism some commentators have eagerly attributed to our 20-somethings. Or perhaps it's as Good.co CEO Samar Birwadker, 33, suspects: millennials believe that work should not only offer a paycheck but also be an expression of "who they are, what they believe and what they stand for."
Either way, if there's one thing universally agreed on, it's that millennials like to be entertained, leading Good.co to make its surveys essentially gamelike. ("Is your manager's approach like a boxer or fencer?" "If your company were a superhero, would it be called Robotica or Chaotica?")
These waters remain less charted, as getting companies to take a hard look at culture is difficult. RoundPegg's Daily, for instance, says he still wrestles with the question of whether to weight the values of senior management more heavily than those of other workers in trying to assess a company's overall culture. Questions like these may keep the workplace matchmaking sector in a kind of beta for some time, but Iowa's Kristof-Brown thinks assessment tools are already eclipsing the industry standard: "There's no reason you should still be relying on, 'Does this face-to-face interview make me think this person is a good fit?'"
Daily puts it more starkly. "I firmly believe that in 10 to 15 years we'll all look back at the early 2000s and the times before, will scratch our heads and think, 'What were we doing ...?' It's the equivalent of using leeches to cure disease."