I heard the other day, “We have a great engagement score, so don’t need to worry about culture …”
Throughout my career, I have observed that culture is often confused, or used interchangeably, with employee engagement. However, culture and employee engagement are two distinct concepts.
Employee Engagement is how people feel about their work and their organisation and is often measured by evaluating a person’s level of pride, advocacy and intent to remain in the organisation.
Culture, on the other hand, can be defined as the way we do things around here. It looks to understand the underlying organisational beliefs about what is important and accepted. That is, what are the behaviours and people systems that drive our work practices? And which symbols and rituals do we engage in daily and accept as common practice in our workplace that are encouraged?
While ‘Culture’ and ‘Employee Engagement’ are different, they are equally important, and one does not exist without the other. In fact, Gallup studies confirm that the biggest driver of employee engagement is culture and understanding this connection is key to transforming your thinking.
It is proven that organisations with higher employee engagement achieve four times earnings-per-share growth to that of their competitors, higher productivity, better retention, fewer accidents, better health outcomes for people and 21% higher profitability.
Getting Culture and Engagement to work together is like getting the balance right on the park seesaw. Remember what happens when a seesaw suddenly becomes unbalanced. One side will fall to the ground – often with a resounding thud! The interchange between culture and engagement has a similar effect.
Consider what we learnt about culture and employee engagement from the VW diesel emissions scandal. Kununu, a Vienna-based employer reviews platform, reported “the company culture of Volkswagen was always about trust, integrity, reliability” and before the scandal, they rated one of the best in almost every dimension of workplace satisfaction in comparison to BMW, Mercedes and its own subsidiary Audi. When news of its emissions testing misconduct emerged, those positive numbers tanked – “They were rated worst in 12 out of 13 (dimensions)”.
The culture of the organisation was not as it seemed. These guys fell off the see-saw big time, putting many years of trust and loyalty at risk and have been working hard since to rebuild their brand and reputation.
VW don’t stand alone. There are many modern-day examples of great engagement scores yet poor cultures. Think, ‘Sandpaper Gate’ (Cricket Australia), the Royal Commission findings into the cultures driving poor behaviour in the banking and finance sectors, all against healthy engagement scores. Each of these Illustrates that the connect between culture and engagement is often underleveraged or not understood.
Understanding your culture and the elements of it, versus your employee engagement score, is the best starting point to develop your culture. It’s great to understand how engaged people are to your organisation. The challenge from a cultural perspective is about how well you understand and can identify the underlying beliefs that are dominant in your organisation and the behaviour they drive. Are your leaders role modelling the behaviour you want? Are your people systems and organisation architecture congruent and driving the culture and behaviour you want?
A strong engagement score is awesome – but don’t be fooled. It is possible to be misguided by a healthy engagement score and yet have a poor culture.
Written by Rosemarie Dentesano.
Working at the intersection of strategy and culture, Rosemarie collaborates with organisations to create pragmatic people solutions that work. She sees her role to provide expert input while mentoring leaders as they drive culture change within their team. Rosemarie is passionate about building an organisation’s capabilities and promoting cultures that thrive.
If you would like to learn more, please contact Rosemarie on 0417 354 117 or email rosemarie@p2psolutions.com.au
