Employee Engagement And Culture: A Very Important Connection

Highlighting The Importance Of An Engagement-Oriented Company Culture

Directly influencing every aspect of the workplace, employee engagement is a critical factor for organizational success, and, unsurprisingly, a prerequisite for a positive working culture. Engagement requires a commitment to the company’s goals, values, and mission, all of which are fundamental cultural components in a corporate environment. If said culture is lacking, how can employees remain engaged and committed to the bottom line?

As such, companies that seek success should prioritize strategies that focus on refining the organization’s identity and processes in order to increase and maintain engagement. This article illustrates the interplay between a well-defined company culture and employee engagement, highlighting the actions organizations can implement to up their metrics and ensure a positive working environment.

Why Employee Engagement Matters

To illustrate the importance of employee engagement, let’s consider two companies, Company A and Company B, using a very simple theoretical example. Company A has built a culture of transparency, innovation, and employee empowerment. Leaders prioritize open communication, ensuring that everyone remains aligned with organizational objectives and feels heard during decision making. Vital information is dispersed from the top down and vice versa, all shared in a timely manner. Managers encourage continuous learning efforts and support their people’s work-life balance by making sure that they work within their bandwidth, take regular breaks, and receive their dividends. As a result of Company A’s well-rounded culture, employee engagement is high. Employees feel a sense of belonging because their efforts are recognized and their growth is prioritized.

Company B has cultivated a culture built on a lack of transparency and micromanagement. Instead of leadership communicating change effectively, employees find out through sudden shifts, rather than open, two-way discussions. Managers focus on strict oversight, completely ignoring the prospect of job satisfaction or work-life balance. Employees work around the clock, even through their lunch breaks, but productivity and morale remain depleted. Upper management provides contradicting directions and constant or unnecessary revisions because essential information keeps getting lost in the shuffle. Within this environment, it’s no wonder that engagement metrics are devastating—not to mention the turnover.

The contrast between these two companies highlights the vital nature of a comprehensive, well-rounded, and engagement-oriented corporate culture. Characterized by trust, open communication, and growth, Company A’s culture encourages employees to invest themselves in their work and in their organization’s success. Contrarily, Company B’s poor work culture yields disengagement, stagnancy, and turnover, affecting the organization’s bottom line. Isn’t it obvious that a good culture is simultaneously a necessity and an incentive for higher employee engagement?

How Does Company Culture Affect Employee Engagement?

1. Work Environment

In the above example, we saw two companies operating within considerably different work environments. Company B’s burnout culture illustrates a work environment that works employees to the bone, without accounting for their job satisfaction, their working capacity, or their work-life balance. This type of environment is responsible for producing apathetic or overworked employees who, despite any wish to do otherwise, are bound to get the minimum done, sinking morale, profits, innovation efforts, and the company’s brand itself. Therefore, a company’s culture is directly correlated with the environment in which it is established. It doesn’t matter if your business preaches that your team is a “family” if it doesn’t reflect your actual practices.

2. Leadership Impact

A good company culture cultivates high-caliber leaders who model organizational values and look out for their teams. Without appropriate leadership, endeavors aiming to refine engagement are bound to fail. Leaders actualize a company’s mission statement and values through daily actions and long-term strategies, which directly influence their team’s commitment, satisfaction, and length of tenure. It’s no wonder, then, that no organizational culture can truly generate and upkeep engagement among employees without positive leadership input.

3. Workload And Growth Opportunities

The provision of growth opportunities and the effective delegation of workload are adept indicators to illustrate the quality of the organization and its culture. You can’t expect your employees to be engaged if you don’t invest in their overall growth. And you can’t invest in an employee’s growth without providing space and opportunities for Learning and Development through effective workload delegation. Balancing workload with L&D opportunities allows your people to work toward both individual and organizational goals. A lack of this balance will lead to burned-out or unequipped employees who are unable to invest in their company’s future or their own, and who will probably look for opportunities elsewhere.

4. Work-Life Balance

Does your company take measures to ensure that its employees balance their personal and professional lives? If not, it might be a broader issue of company culture. Your organization’s identity is directly reflected in the actions it implements to ensure well-being and prosperity among your teams. A toxic work culture and environment will have you believe that success lies in overburdened employees who work well after their shift has ended. Don’t be fooled—you only succeed in plummeting their engagement and shortening their would-be tenures.

Ingredients For A Winning Work Culture

1. Comprehensive Mission Statement

To build a winning work culture with great employee engagement metrics, take a look at your mission statement. Is it comprehensive? Does it demonstrate your company’s values and provide actionable guidelines for actualizing them? If it doesn’t, it is time for a revamp. Of course, this is more than the text you advertise in the About Us section of your website. It is the core of your identity, a blueprint to guide all of your efforts, and a way to ensure that all stakeholders, employees, and leaders are on the same page.

2. Streamlined Decision Making And Open Communication

The next step would be to examine your company’s internal communication and decision-making processes. Company cultures that preach collaboration, transparency, and openness should actively address roadblocks in decision-making workflows, eradicating communication silos or gaps in operational efficiency. Pay extra attention to how information and knowledge are dispersed internally. Is everyone on the same page? Are updates shared on time? What can you do to further improve and establish an internal feedback loop that will drive efforts forward? If not addressed proactively, these aspects are perfectly acceptable reasons for an employee to start a job search anew.

3. Employee Empowerment

Organizational cultures that value employee growth and development are bound to have more engaged staff. It’s not uncommon for employees to leave an organization and pursue other opportunities with employers that value Learning and Development. A very significant percentage of the current workforce factors in the ability of an organization to provide growth opportunities, so it’s time to make it a component of culture. Empowerment-driven cultures have the advantage when it comes to not only employee engagement, but also retention, talent attraction, and positive brand perception.

4. Innovation-Oriented Collective Mindset

High-engagement cultures are instrumental in the incubation of innovation. Do you think that companies with low-engagement cultures can pursue fresh ideas and tread in unexplored markets? Well, if they do, they probably don’t have great chances of success. Organizational cultures that cultivate innovation-oriented mindsets are more likely to bring disruptive change, experiment, problem-solve, and generate greater profits in pursuit of unchartered, cutting-edge ideas. How can a company achieve this if its staff isn’t committed to their organization’s success?

5. Recognition

A robust company culture recognizes the work its employees invest. It celebrates their successes and acknowledges their efforts, even in times of failure. By prioritizing recognition as part of the overall organizational culture, companies illustrate to their employees that their engagement, dedication, and loyalty don’t go unnoticed. Recognition is a vital ingredient in any high-engagement culture and a prerequisite for ensuring motivation and effort in the long run.

Actionable Steps For Cultivating A High-Engagement Culture

• Create An Engagement Strategy

Employee engagement strategies are essential for broader organizational change. Without them, any attempt to shift things around can fail. So, take the extra time to devise an actionable plan that will address the specific needs of your employees.

• Prioritize Employee Needs

Learn what your people need. Conduct surveys, keep communication open, and make sure that everyone utilizes their voice to communicate their needs and expectations.

While every leader wants perfect metrics all year round, acknowledge that engagement can fluctuate due to a number of factors. So, show compassion and practice empathy, even if it doesn’t immediately get you higher percentages. It may just be what your people need.

• Model What You Want To See In Others

You can’t expect your employees to go above and beyond if you don’t do the same. Organizational values are transferred from the top down, after all.

Conclusion

A main ingredient of a well-defined company culture is taking action to ensure and safeguard employee well-being and engagement. You can’t run a successful company without engaged employees. And you can’t have engaged employees without a healthy, comprehensive company culture. A committed workforce and a positive working environment matter more than you think, so don’t wait to get started.