Employee Engagement and Company Culture
The link between engagement and company culture is not hard to find. We define culture as how and why things truly get done in an organization. We define employee engagement as the strength of the mental and emotional connection employees feel toward their places of work.
Employee engagement is NOT the same thing as happiness, satisfaction, or well-being, and company culture is NOT the same thing as employee engagement.
Why Engagement and Culture Matter
Employees that are engaged, understand their job, and have positive feelings toward their manager are two to four times more productive than other employees. They are also twice as unlikely to be looking to leave.
Our organizational alignment research found that healthy and aligned company cultures account for 40% of the difference between high and low performing organizations in terms of revenue growth, profitability, customer retention, and employee engagement. In fact, culturally aligned organizations with high-trust return 286% more value to stakeholders than low-trust organizations.
The Link between Engagement and Company Culture
There is a strong link between engagement and company culture. We believe that there are three levels of a company culture that have a direct link to employee engagement.
Every company wants to be healthy and every employee wants to work for a healthy organization. Organizational health creates the foundation for high performance by actively engaging employees.
Companies with high performance cultures provide clear performance expectations, use fair methods to measure performance, and create meaningful motivation to perform.
It is difficult to create high performance with a disengaged workforce.
These overly complex and often conflicting sets of beliefs can severely undermine strategic progress.
It is difficult to change underlying belief systems unless you have healthy levels of employee engagement.
Four Steps to Achieve Higher Levels of Employee Engagement
Without high levels of organizational health and employee engagement, it is difficult to create a high performing and aligned company culture to help move your company’s strategy forward. After you fully assess your company culture, take these four steps to set the foundation for both people and business success.
If engagement truly matters to you business, hold your people and project managers accountable for nurturing it.
The Bottom Line
A high performing and aligned company culture go hand in hand with a proactively engaged workforce. Your culture forms the foundation for employee engagement and organizational health – a “ticket to play the people game” for any well run organization.
If you want to learn about research-backed ways to improve employee engagement, download The Top 10 Most Powerful Ways to Boost Engagement
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