Metric for Corporate Culture

Corporate culture is considered an important reason to work for a company by a lot of folks. What does corporate culture really mean? and How is it measured if at all? How do companies establish this culture and make sure that it is in the veins of each and every employee?



I have worked for a few companies and all of them were proud of the culture of their company. Couple of them had established core values within the company that applied to everyone and in one case they tweaked it to the different roles within the company on top of the base set of core values. Personally I felt that the core values provided some sort of a guiding principle though they can mis-interpreted at certain times to make people look good. I have not found a place that uses a quantitative approach to gather and publish metrics around company culture. I am not sure how you would go about gathering and publishing these metrics though surveys come to mind. Surveys are useful if done on a large sample I would think, however since surveys are based on what and how people are thinking, in my mind it is not necessarily a rigourous tool.

Has anyone used other methodologies to report on corporate culture?