Stop Doing Engagement Surveys. Start Assessing Your Culture.

Every company establishes a unique culture to differentiate who they are and to achieve higher levels of performance. Yet each year, companies continue to measure something else: engagement or health. They spend hours and hours analyzing engagement surveys with no real impact on their employees or business performance. It’s time to stop measuring engagement and start measuring the very culture you wish to create. Assessing the culture leads to clear actions that create higher levels of engagement, better performance, and real outcomes. Every CEO and CHRO should have this mantra going forward “Ditch engagement surveys. Measure our culture.”

?Employee Engagement Survey Impact

Employee engagement surveys began in the 1990s1. Over 30 years later, on mostly an annual basis, companies continue to conduct employee engagement or organizational health surveys. These surveys with their typically long (ranging from 30-50 questions), and static nature (questions rarely change), can be influenced by the company and time of year (e.g., bonuses or promotions shared before conducting the survey), and the results depend on how people are feeling the day they take it.

Companies do this to assess how their scores trend from year to year against themselves and benchmarks. In their 2023 report, Gallup found that only 33% of employees were engaged and that those not engaged or actively disengaged accounted for $1.9 trillion lost in productivity.2 While such benchmarks are valuable for comparisons, every company has a unique culture, which creates a different employee experience within each organization. Ambiguous outputs about how happy employees are with the company, their direct manager, or their role do not produce a clear set of actions for a company to take. In fact, the results and improvement actions of an engagement or health survey are rarely shared across the company unless the scores have improved, and even then, many companies cherry-pick the best scores and take little action. Employees want to feel heard and see their feedback leads to action. 74% of employees are more effective in their work when they feel heard3.

With little impact or action coming out of engagement or health surveys, why do companies continue running them?

Culture Assessment Impact

There is a better way. Since each company has a unique strategy, purpose, and culture, this uniqueness should be continually assessed. This allows the company to strengthen their culture, which will, in turn, improve their performance. Gartner estimates that strengthening company culture can?boost employee performance by 22% and reputation outcomes by 16%4. ?Happiness is fluid. A company’s purpose and values are constant.

?Your culture shapes the employee experience, helps employees deliver on the strategy, drives performance, and improves engagement. No company defines their culture to emulate another company. Each company defines a specific purpose and values for their organization. Their unique DNA defines who they want to be and how they want to achieve their goals. This provides a clear set of elements to measure against. Your company defined these elements because this is how it wants your people to show up and what you believe will ensure your company achieves the set strategy and performance goals. Therefore, this is what companies must measure.

To do this, companies should take their defined purpose and values and ask employees

How much they experience them on a day-to-day basis?
How much they see their leaders living them?
How much impact they have on performance?        

The output of a culture assessment reveals a set of key findings and lays out specific actions to take that no engagement survey can provide, such as:

Example Finding: The extent your values exist and the impact they have on employees and performance
Example Actions: Apply specific interventions (e.g., recognition program, targeted training, sharing stories to clarify what the values look like in practice) to reinforce one or more of the values, depending on which are not being experienced        

Example Finding: Leaders are not living the values
Example Actions: Share with leaders that employees do not feel they are modeling the right behaviors, adjust their incentives to reinforce the values, and deploy targeted training on the values they are lacking        

Case Study

One organization with a strong culture conducted a culture assessment to understand how their values were being lived and the impact on employees and performance. They had six values and, through a culture diagnostic, discovered employees felt five of the six were highly experienced and impactful across the organization. However, the sixth value (focused on giving back to the community) was rarely experienced. The leadership team was tasked with either eliminating this value, as it may not be core to who they are, or doing more to prop it up to make sure their people felt it was essential to the company’s success. The team agreed impacting the community was essential to who they are and want to be. This led to a targeted effort, with specific actions that better connected employees with their community to focus solely on this value. The impact was clearly felt, with employees participating in 113 volunteer events across 20+ countries and over $450,000 donated as part of the employee matching gift program in 2023. An engagement or organizational health survey would not have revealed this finding, led to a deep discussion among the leadership team, or resulted in a set of targeted actions.

?Connection to Employee Engagement

Culture assessments are short, typically consisting of less than 20 questions, and can be tailored to the company’s needs at the time. This can include adding 1-2 engagement questions, but not solely to be a benchmark. Instead, it will be a control data point to compare against the rest of the results. For example, the results could show the least engaged employees feel leaders are not living the values or do not see the connection between the values and performance. This could lead to specific actions where the organization works with the managers, leading these disengaged employees to better live the values and/or better connect the values to their team’s performance.

?Summary

Engaged employees result in higher company performance5, and this engagement is driven by the company’s defined culture. Therefore, to improve engagement, companies must focus their efforts on ensuring their purpose and values are real and built into every fabric of the organization. For this very reason, companies must assess and measure the level to which their culture is lived. Engagement and organizational health surveys do not provide this view, nor do they deliver actions that impact the culture. The best method is conducting a culture assessment and then using the results to more fully embed and spread your desired culture. This will result in increased employee engagement and higher levels of performance for the organization.

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1. Drivers_of_Employee_Engagement_New.pdf (engagedly.com)
2. In New Workplace, U.S. Employee Engagement Stagnates (gallup.com)
3. Employee Listening Strategies & Examples that Work (qualtrics.com)
4. The Impact of Organizational Culture on Employee Performance
5. The Impact of Employee Engagement on Performance

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