When talking to clients, particularly those who have recently completed an engagement survey, they will ask whether they need to analyze both engagement and culture. There are the usual concerns around survey fatigue. Clients also wonder whether both measures are essentially looking at the same thing.
Though the two are certainly connected, there are key differences between engagement and culture that warrant separate consideration and analysis, if the organization is looking to optimize its work environment and performance.
Objective – Motivating Individual Performance vs. Driving Global Performance
Engagement is a way of motivating individual retention and performance. Culture casts a much wider net. Culture reflects the prevailing mindset and attitudes across the organization and defines the rules by which people work and relate to one another – becoming, in essence, the organization’s silent operating manual. A healthy and productive culture can provide direction to staff and drive performance of the unit or organization as a whole.
Focus – Personal Issues vs. How the Work Gets Done
Given their distinct objectives, engagement and culture surveys tend to focus on a different set of issues. Engagement surveys speak more to personal issues – the employee’s alignment with the mission, the extent to which the organization is serving the employee’s basic needs, the level of support an employee receives from their manager and co-workers, and individual growth opportunities. From that, the organization can learn how connected employees are to the organization and the people who work there, why employees are or aren’t productive in their roles, and how likely they are to stay at the company over time.
Where engagement scores are a proxy for employee motivation and commitment, culture surveys tell us more about what causes the organization to act in a certain way and how work gets done. This draws on a wider set of variables that aren’t always apparent on the surface, making them more difficult to capture and comprehend.
Carpe Diem recently launched its Culture ScreenTM, which looks at four different aspects of an organization’s culture.
- Organizational Priorities – what drives the organization at a foundational level. Does the organization live by its values or just talk about its values? Does it support work-life balance or apply a 24/7 mentality?
- Decision-Making Style – how the organization approaches its opportunities and challenges. Is the organization proactive or reactive? Does it seek out long-term solutions or apply more of band-aid approach?
- Leadership Style – how leaders position themselves in their role and support their people. Are leaders accessible and engaged with their teams? Do they recognize employee achievement or call out employee mistakes?
- Social Structure – the nature of the staff’s relationship with the organization and with one another. Are they proud to work at the company? Do they think team first? Are they willing and able to work through conflicts?
The findings from a culture survey can still provide insights on employee motivation, productivity, and retention. However, by delving more into the inner workings of the organization, they can also help to establish what is driving organizational success, or what might be helping or hindering execution of key business objectives.
Let’s say an organization wants to create a greater level of accountability among leaders and staff. That would be easier to do if team members had a sense of PURPOSE [a defined set of values to guide their actions and clear directives around performance], OWNERSHIP [they were empowered to act on their strengths and recognized/rewarded for their accomplishments] and TRUST [they had a sense of community and were invested in the overall success of the company]. These are all manifestations of the culture.
Point of Action – Local vs. Global
As their areas of focus differ, results from engagement and culture surveys are often owned and acted upon by different parties. Gallup famously highlights the fact that 70% of the variance in employee engagement can be attributed back to the local manager. So, it is the local manager who typically owns the action planning around the survey data.
Culture cuts across individual teams and sits more at the departmental, regional, business unit, or organizational level. Culture is therefore, directed by the leaders of those respective groups – and they are the ones tasked with driving any necessary change or improvement.
Ability to Drive Change at an Organizational Level
Since the action occurs at the more senior levels of the organization, around more enterprise-level issues, culture tends to be the stronger lever for organizational change. There may be company-wide programs put in place around engagement or directives to work on a common set of engagement issues. However, execution relies heavily on the local manager and the impact is seen primarily at the team level.
A second issue with engagement is that there are a common set of drivers across companies. This provides for easier comparison of scores and allows companies to quickly assess their progress based on the improvement in their GrandMean score or percentile rankings. Yet it does tend to focus the action on the survey questions, rather than the company’s business challenges.
There is no similar gold standard around culture. The “ideal” culture for an organization is whatever makes the most sense in that stage of its history and development. There are cultural traits that are more likely to be present in thriving organizations. But the precise combination and depth of those traits will vary, even among successful companies in the same industry or geography.
This means there are more directions you can take the culture to further the company’s business objectives. If the goal is around accountability you might work on one set of traits. If it’s around innovation, collaboration, or urgency, to name but a few examples, you might work on other traits. Success here is less about the culture score and more about success on the underlying objective.
This is not meant to negate the importance of engagement on the organization and its employees. Yet by looking solely at engagement, the organization could miss out on opportunities to identify and address issues that are holding back its success.
These market insights from Carpe Diem Global Partners are gathered from the firm’s extensive client work with Board, CEO, CXO, and CHRO leaders in public and private multinational companies. For deeper, custom insights, contact Craig Kamins at ckamins@carpediempartners.com.