How Company Culture Affects Employee Engagement

Employee engagement and culture are now business issues, not just topics for HR to debate. And there’s no place for organizations to hide.

• In an era of heightened corporate transparency, greater workforce mobility, and severe skills shortages, culture, engagement, and retention have emerged as top issues for business leaders. These issues are not simply an HR problem.
• Culture and engagement is the most important issue companies face around the world. 87 percent of organizations cite culture and engagement as one of their top challenges, and 50 percent call the problem “very important.”
• Organizations that create a culture defined by meaningful work, deep employee engagement, job and organizational fit, and strong leadership are outperforming their peers and will likely beat their competition in attracting top talent.

What is employee engagement and how does it link with culture change? Is it the latest corporate jargon or is there real business value in it? Finally, what will it take to engage your employees and where do you start?

In the last two decades there has been significant change in the culture of many organisations, a shift in the way employees are valued and treated, and recognition of the impact employees have on business success. Most organisations attempt to create a culture and environment that reflect their values, mission and goals and some actively focus on engaging their employees as a key driver of success.

The term ‘culture change’ could mean any change in organisational culture, from recruitment strategies to working from home, but what ‘culture change’ meant to the organisations I worked with was in fact ‘employee engagement’ and the reason they have been so successful in engaging their employees is because they invested the time, energy and commitment to create a change in their culture.

Employee engagement isn’t a quick fix and it can’t be accomplished with a staff survey, a change in process or procedure, a motivational training course or an HR initiative. It requires an investment in time, energy and commitment from every leader in the organisation to drive and sustain it. Only a change in the way an organisation thinks, behaves and acts will achieve a culture of employee engagement.

What is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is a direct result of a strong company culture. It refers to how employees feel about their culture and their jobs. The stronger a company’s culture, the better employees understand what is expected of them and what they’re working toward. Engaged employees are more likely to stay happy, motivated, and committed to your company.

Overall, an engaged employee is more:

• Connected to your company’s mission
• Motivated to exceed their goals
• Proactive about learning new skills and starting new projects
• Positive in their approach to work
• Creative in solving problems
• Committed to developing their careers are your organization

Engaged employees also provide a whole bunch of benefits to your organization: Higher productivity, better customer relations, and lower turnover are just a start. Just check out the numbers:

• Highly engaged employees are 21% more productive.
• Seventy-three percent of disengaged employees are actively looking for jobs, compared with 37% of engaged employees.
• Increasing your investment into engagement by 10% can increase your profits by $2,400 per employee each year.

According to Deloitte’s Global Human Capital Trends 2015, company culture and employee engagement are driving issues for organizations around the world. These words get thrown around a lot, and rightly so.

How an organisation treats its employees has a direct impact on its employees’ engagement. 

"In the United Kingdom 17% of employees are engaged, 57% are not engaged and 26% are actively disengaged" - Gallup.

Actively disengaged employees outnumber engaged employees by nearly two to one.

Engaged employees work with passion and feel an emotional connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward. They are characterised as being loyal, committed, productive and they deliver results.

Not Engaged employees come to work and do what is asked of them but have little energy or passion for their work. They feel no meaningful attachment to their job or company. They can easily be tempted by job vacancies elsewhere.

Actively Disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they actively show their unhappiness. These employees demonstrate negative, unc-ooperative and sometimes hostile behaviours and attitude. They undermine their teams and their business.

What is Organizational Culture?

Organizational culture determines how and why things get done in your organization. Your organizational culture reflects the environment, the behaviors, the values, the office rituals, and the language of those working in one workplace.

What is a High-Performance Company Culture?

Not all organizational cultures are created equal. Your company’s behaviors and norms can be unhealthy and unsupportive. But take heart: Your organization has the power to build a high-performance culture.

A high-performance culture has behaviors and norms that lead your organization to achieve superior results by setting clear business goals, defining employees’ responsibilities, creating a trusting environment, and encouraging employees to continuously grow and reinvent themselves. High-performance cultures are supportive, positive, and proactive. They engage employees daily.

Companies with high-performance cultures lead their industry and recruit top talent (think Google). These are companies with a distinct culture that allows them to stay competitive in the employer and financial market.

How Does Culture Affect Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is a direct outcome of a high-performance company culture.

Why? Because high-performance cultures clearly outline behaviors and norms that are healthy and supportive. Employees clearly understand their culture and what is expected of them. They feel connected. They feel involved. They feel supported. And, therefore, they feel engaged.

Culture and employee engagement are closely tied. To improve employee engagement, start by improving your company culture. Here are a few ways to do so:

Clearly Define Your Culture

The first step to having a strong culture — one that leads to strong engagement — is documenting it. Your culture is the DNA and backbone of your organization. As you would with any business strategy or objective, define it clearly!

To start, work with your leadership team to define:

• Your company mission
• Your company vision
• Your company values
• Expectations about employee behaviors

Document your defined culture. This can be in a presentation, an employee handbook, your Intranet system — or all of the above. Once you’ve done so, widely distribute your documented culture. Follow up on the materials by presenting your defined culture. This can take place at company-wide town halls, team meetings, manager-employee 1:1 meetings — or, again, all of the above.

Survey Your Employees

Measure your organization’s culture regularly. In doing so, you’ll:

• Understand what’s working in your company culture
• Understand what to improve in your company culture
• Make employees feel heard
• Uncover ideas from employees you may not have thought of

Here are five creative ways 

A) Prioritizing Action Steps

B) Meeting Preparation

C) Regular Sentiment Monitoring

D) Decision Making

E)  Idea Sourcing

to use employee surveys to strengthen your culture and, therefore, employee engagement.

Involve Your Employees

Once you’ve learned how to improve your culture, involve your employees! Communicate your action plan that stems from their feedback. Create focus groups around your action items. Hold options brainstorm sessions to gather ideas from employees. However you choose to involve employees, the payoff will be big. Employees will feel they’re helping shape their company culture — and they’ll increase their engagement in the process.

Employee Engagement? Company Culture? The Struggle is Real.

Eighty-seven percent of HR leaders state that company culture and engagement are their biggest challenges. It makes sense.

There are several reasons culture and engagement are rising as relevant challenges for organizations.

To start, employer branding has become more and more important. Employees are very much like customers. With the changes in the job market, employees have greater opportunities than they had in the past. This puts employers in the position of having to actively attract employees, all while employees’ perceptions about work are changing. For the most part, employees no longer prioritize staying at a single job until retirement, and instead, they are more likely to choose a job that interests them and aligns with their passion and values. Cue organizational culture and employee engagement.

Culture and engagement can also feel nebulous. Values? Behaviors? Norms? How do you dial into each of these to improve culture and, thus, engagement? Start with the recommendations above. Surveying employees, especially, will transform something that feels particularly qualitative into a quantitative objective. You’ll be able to measure, analyze, and report against your culture. And what you can measure, you can improve.

Creating a strong culture has a lot of pressure. It’s not a one-and-done objective to achieve. Instead, your culture needs to be regularly cultivated for long-term value. Employee engagement is the same way — it will ebb and flow. Your organization needs to regularly invest in culture to regularly see the resulting engaged employee base.

Conclusion

Employee engagement is a change in culture – a change in how leaders lead, what they do and the decisions they make. It is not the accountability of a single department nor is it an initiative or a project that a focus group or a specialist team can deliver. Unless employee engagement becomes a fundamental part of an organisation’s philosophy and ingrained within the attitude and behaviour of the leaders, then it will become ‘just another initiative’ with little effect.

So, before you spend time and money on commissioning the next employee survey, establishing the next process or launching the latest communication event, ask yourself - did I spend time with my team today, did I listen to them, did I make them feel valued, did I tell them they did a good job and coached them when they didn’t. And most importantly - did I help them to feel engaged?

By providing training opportunities, the latest in technological advancements, managerial support, and an open mind about what makes a great workplace environment, companies can evolve to keep pace with employees’ expectations to really drive success. The key is that this is an ongoing process. Engagement doesn’t just happen — you have to focus employee needs over time, and use that to drive a strong culture.