Introduction: Culture and employee engagement

Globally, employee engagement is stagnating and employee stress is at an all-time high, according to Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report. Among UK workers it’s even more worrying; employee engagement has declined steadily over the past decade and a tiny nine percent now say they feel enthused by their work and workplace today.

None of this is good news for the world’s employers. As Gallup research has consistently found, employee engagement is a significant determinant of organisational performance and an effective means of implementing organisational change. This is because it is a reflection of how supported employees feel by their managers and how connected they feel to the organisation’s mission, purpose and culture. Ultimately, engaged employees are more committed to their organisation and give extra discretionary effort because they are empowered to thrive at work.

In 2020, Gallup conducted its 10th employee engagement ‘meta-analysis’ looking at 456 research studies across 276 organisations in 54 industries and 96 countries. The research covered 2.7 million employees and reinforced earlier studies in showing a strong connection between high employee engagement and greater customer loyalty, profitability and productivity among 11 measures of performance.

To produce those levels of engagement, however, requires managers to craft a strong, meaningful and productive culture. And at the same time, the relationship between culture and engagement is reciprocal. A thriving organisational culture is nearly impossible to achieve if employees are not engaged in their work. Disengaged employees are simply less likely to buy into and support cultural changes or heed leaders’ messages.

In short, engaged employees are the fuel for an organisation. Culture – driven by purpose and brand – sets the direction.

Fundamentally, engagement centres on meeting essential employee needs. It helps leaders and managers focus on the actions that matter most to their team members and creates employees and teams that are poised for high performance. Culture, on the other hand, is a pervasive force that influences the way people work together, how decisions get made, which behaviours are rewarded and who gets promoted.

Ensuring that employees feel they are building a successful future for their organisation – and so for themselves – is key to good employee engagement, according to Gallup, and that comes about in no little part from setting and maintaining a healthy corporate culture. As we cover elsewhere in this content series, boards play a core role in corporate culture and so it is vital that they understand the health of the culture they are responsible for, and whether the decisions they oversee are making a positive or negative difference.

Culture surveys are a powerful way to generate this understanding, if done well. And, although board members won’t run a survey themselves, it will pay them to understand how these surveys should be run, what data should be gleaned from them and – most importantly – how that should be used to improve organisational culture. We partnered with Gallup, one of the world’s leading specialists, to provide this outline for board members and senior managers.

What should a culture survey aim to achieve?

Culture surveys are a valuable tool to measure sentiment and identify areas for improvement, but can a survey truly capture something as amorphous as culture?

Surveys need to address three essential questions that will have the greatest impact on culture:

1. Do we deliver a sense of purpose?

Employees today want their work to matter and feel a connection to a company’s mission and purpose. Whereas previous generations may have been preoccupied with pay and benefits, this purpose-driven ethos fundamentally changes the role of the leadership team and managers.

2. Do we really understand our culture?

Successful leaders set the entire strategy and direction of the business, which includes the overall culture, and it’s therefore imperative to measure how people feel about the leadership of the company.

3. Can we drive change?

While leaders set the direction, they rely on great managers to build a compelling culture because they structure how work gets done and influence day-to-day experiences. Changing behaviour requires a clear plan and accountability.

Surveys that explore these three questions together, use quantitative and qualitative metrics, and are followed up with robust action plans, are the most successful at driving cultural change and improvements.

1) What you should expect from a survey

Why survey company culture?

Culture surveys help to deal with issues such as high attrition rates, productivity problems, burnout and stress levels, and lacklustre growth. It’s important to identify the goals of the survey from the outset.

Connecting culture metrics to internal key performance indicators is essential to build a best-in-class company culture.

Therefore, the first question is, who are you holding accountable?

If this question is directed at the leadership, the survey will focus on different questions and elements of culture versus a survey focused on issues at the team level. Both strategies offer important insight into a company’s culture and should be conducted in tandem, ideally.

Survey length and frequency

Culture surveys should take place on a six- or 12-month cycle to capture any changes that are taking place.

When measuring culture across the entire organisation, focus on the attributes that will gauge employee perceptions about their connection to the organisation’s culture and values. Helpful context and guidance regarding Gallup’s proprietary indicator items to measure employee perceptions of culture can be found here: Gallup Organisational Culture Indicators: What We Measure.

A whole business measurement could be supported by interim pulses across the entire population and/or targeted pulses for particular groups. Quarterly surveys could delve into break-out subjects such as inclusion, wellbeing, engagement and change management.

As a general rule, the more regular the survey, the shorter it should be, even as few as three or four questions. Quarterly polls with 30 questions, for example, are too long and do not allow time between surveys to take action. And this is the key point — successful culture surveys are used to trigger behaviour change initiatives.

Quantitative versus qualitative

Culture surveys should generally combine both quantitative and qualitative data if they are to spur change as a result.

The qualitative component does not need to be survey-based and it can be carried out after the quantitative data is gathered. For example, data may reveal teams with the strongest/weakest connection to the organisation’s culture, and qualitative interviews can help identify what these teams’ strengths and weaknesses are in more detail. Or a combination of both may work, whereby a quantitative survey score of less than five triggers an open-ended question that asks for more detail.

Use the quantitative data to understand the issue and the qualitative insights to dive deeper so you can identify what to change.

Survey pitfalls

Poor question design

Ensuring the survey output cannot be warped or influenced by different stakeholders, including management, is paramount to achieve a fair reflection of company culture. Often, this relates to successful question design. Ensure you appoint someone sufficiently senior to manage the process who can mediate between different parts of the organisation. 

Skewed data

Surveys are often crafted on a five-point scale with ‘agree’ at one end and ‘strongly disagree’ at the other. Prevailing wisdom says that favourable responses ie, a high proportion of 5s, reveal areas of high performance. Yet many businesses will rank the fives and fours together to give the appearance of better performance. The difference between a five and a four is vast – a four is a ‘yes…but’ and there is more valuable information in the ‘but’. Cast a critical eye over the data and question when data sets are combined.

Honesty and anonymity

Using an outside vendor or a partner that will only share aggregated scores at the team level and above offers a greater degree of confidentiality so people are inclined to be more honest in their feedback.

Furthermore, people tend to rate individuals higher than they rate groups and surveys that focus too much on individuals risk becoming popularity contests. For example, asking how the CEO is doing will likely garner a greater score than asking how the leadership team is doing. Avoid questions that focus on individuals and, instead, focus on an element of work that highlights how well-managed people feel.

2) Taking action on employee feedback

Working to improve or transform company culture should start in earnest once the survey results are delivered and digested. Board members and senior managers play a vital role here. They need to ensure that the results are used as quickly as possible to start producing realisable action plans to address the issues raised.

Senior managers should communicate the results within a few days, starting with the leadership team. Every manager, whether it’s the CEO and the immediate leadership team, or the frontline team and everybody else in between, needs to understand the results.

More specifically, managers must:

1. Understand what the results mean
2. Take ownership for those results with their team
3. Act on the results.

Action planning

Designing a successful culture survey ultimately depends on the specific behaviour change the organisation hopes to achieve. Question type, survey length and frequency should be structured in order to drive action.

Leaders – supported or, where necessary, prompted by board members – should develop action plans that account for the culture survey’s findings and identify steps to address prominent areas of concern highlighted by the survey. The action plan should also consider the organisation’s culture roadmap, including an estimation of the time that will be required to effect change throughout the organisation and progress the culture towards the desired state, as supported by the relevant survey findings.

3) Summary and recommendations

Companies with best-in-class cultures are not afraid to seek feedback, even among disengaged employees. Regardless of what’s going on in the business or the economy, they recognise that change is a constant and engage with employees frequently.

Six steps to a great culture survey

1. Identify the company performance goals from the outset – are you looking at culture to improve performance, diversity and inclusion, safety, innovation, for example?
2. Take a measurement across the entire organisation – assess what your current culture is, even if you think you know.
3. Establish accountability – managers need to create accountability for individual performance and the most senior managers must be accountable for tying the scores back to business.
4. Identify areas for improvement – organisational change takes time. Measure culture frequently and monitor progress with interim pulse surveys.
5. Deliver the results swiftly – whenever a survey is taken, establish a pattern of communicating the results within a few days.
6. Understand the results, take ownership and act on them in line with the company’s most important performance metrics.