From 100 feet or through a microscope?
More often than not, we perceive organizational challenges to be more complex than they really are. We hire expensive consulting firms to create metrics that can only be reported in the form of a circumplex, a composite score or something else that justifies the price tag. I fully support complex analysis and your business would not be the same without it, but don’t forget to blend in your street-level knowledge or you can miss the point altogether. Use these tools to fine tune your understanding, but if you need them to understand generally what is going on, you’re really not paying attention at a day to day level. Complexity is a beautiful thing, but metrics require both art and science to be useful.
To briefly defend complexity, it can be incredibly useful from an HR strategy perspective to know how your organization compares to 1000 other leading companies in key areas of organization culture, as they impact propensity for performance. To briefly defend the blending of simplicity, all of the metrics in the world won’t offset an executive who acting like a jackass and is sabotaging all of the good work your HR team is doing.
Go ahead and run macro, market, micro surveys to generate circumplexes and composite scores… but read them within the context of the feedback you should be getting by being in touch with your business.