Open Org's Culture Heat-map

A diagnostic tool to assess your Culture using Open Org’s Culture OS, which frames culture as a series of tangible “how we…” statements. This approach makes it easier to diagnose opportunity areas and more accessible when communicating to executives.

This is not about determining whether you have a ‘great’ culture against some external set of variables. It’s about building a view of which components of your culture are currently serving you and your business context, and which aren’t.

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👤 Who is this for?

Startup/Scale-up People Leaders

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⏱️ When to use:

Use this when you want to take a structured approach to inform your people and culture roadmap. This tool provides the foundation for better discussions with your leadership team, your People & Culture team, or as the basis for an alternative to an engagement survey with your whole organization.

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🧩 Culture components:

🔄 How we make and communicate decisions

🤝 How we collaborate cross-functionally

🔔 How we communicate sync/async

📅 How we do meetings

🚨 How we raise problems

📈 How we run big projects

🏗️ How we build and scale processes

🌱 How we embrace and embed change

💡 How we handle failure

👋 How we onboard new team members

⚖️ How we fire

🧑 How we lead and manage

🎯 How we stay aligned on mission/vision

💰 How we incentivise

🎉 How we celebrate wins

🚫 How we outlaw behaviours that don't serve us

✅ How we reinforce behaviours that do serve us

📊 How we hold ourselves accountable

📚 How we develop ourselves

💡 How we share knowledge

📌 How we prioritise

🤝 How we solve conflict

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❓ How to use

High-level steps:

1. Make a copy of this tool by heading to the top right of the page and hitting the ‘duplicate’ button.
2. Assess each culture component and give it a **Health Score** (see key below) and journal the reasons for assigning that score.
3. Write down your problem statement.
4. Use “The 5 whys” to understand the root cause.
5. Generate solution ideas.
6. Choose the right approach for your context.
7. Prioritise and execute.

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👉 This diagnostic can easily be modified into either a survey or an org-wide asynchronous facilitation. If you’d like help with any of the steps above (e.g., problem statements, root cause analysis, or choosing the right approach to de-risk your people and culture roadmap), get in touch for a virtual coffee ☕. This is us. 🤘

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Enjoy!

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Adam & John, openorg.fyi

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🤫 Psst! If Culture is high-priority for you right now, we support a small, select handful of people teams via our monthly culture support offering; TL;DR - Adam & John, in your pocket, on-demand to mentor, advise, soundboard, spar, and prototype & build alongside you to accelerate your people & culture projects & roadmap.

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ℹ️ Health Score Key:

- 💚 Healthy = “This is working well for us right now”
- 📉 Needs Improvement = “We have some surgery we need to do”
- 🔥 Dumpster Fire = “This is causing us material time and money”
- 🤷‍♂️ Not Sure = “I’m not sure if we do that, or how we do it at all”

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