Two sides of culture both driving employee engagement.

Strong potential employees don’t really care about massages, ping pong tables or free lunches when it comes to choosing their next career move. The employees you want are interested in a work environment that will enable them to grow their careers, provide greater satisfaction and give them the experiences that make work worthwhile.

Culture is the key differentiator in the choice of ‘great places to work’. Culture sets you apart as an organization and ultimately forms the competitive landscape.     Yet culture has two different sides.

Modern employees still want great financial compensation packages – but they also want things that money can’t buy, such as an office environment that makes them happy and comfortable – whether that office environment fosters creativity, is laid back and relaxed, or makes work fun. Companies supply data driven, mobile and on the spot working experiences which of course attract Millennials in the hope they’ll be engaged by it. So far for the environment, which is only one side of culture.

With all the nice and attractive structures in place, the engagement just starts, or doesn’t start at all.

A key factor in driving employee engagement and business growth through culture is how employees feel about their employers. How do they behave? Are they willing to share knowledge? Are they willing to dedicate time? This is where the travel really starts; it’s the other side of culture, called leadership behaviour.

If leadership wants to create engagement, they’ll need to increase ownership with themselves and by that with their employees. People need to want to participate. The big question is how to do that. It is not so much talking about culture, it is doing culture.

I see too many companies that have adressed their company culture, put their vision, mission and values on posters on walls for everybody to see and go on with business as usual. We have adressed it. Yet the actual change is in bringing your own and others’ behaviour in line with it.

If you want people to engage in your culture and if you want to create ownership, you’ll have to ask questions as to what your people think is the best solution for something, and make them work with it. We like working with our own solutions.

The second thing is to check progress throughout the process and not when something is supposed to be delivered. If you’ve shown interest, offered help along the way, you’ve minimised the risk something will not be delivered according to agreed standards.

If you compliment people on their achievements they feel good. If you give feedback afterwards about the quality and speed and how that could be improved they'll be more inspired to listen and learn. You're coaching people to become more effective as well as more independent.

By acting this way you establish more ownership. Culture is about behaviour, as is engagement. It’s no rocketscience, it’s enjoyable work to create ownership.           It’s enjoyable to enable people to be succesful.