Culture shock: Why relying on engagement scores alone to understand your team is a mistake

For years, employers have been relying on engagement scores to understand the wellbeing of their employees and by extension, their company culture.

In the past year in particular, with so many organisations remote working for the first time and workforce changes aplenty, this has become an even more relied-upon metric.

And while it’s been great to see an increased focus on employee engagement, it’s time for a truthbomb: relying on engagement scores as a primary metric for understanding your organisation’s culture is a mistake.

As part of my work with some of Australia’s biggest and best-known companies and smaller ones too, I’ve noticed a growing trend of companies treating engagement scores as the be-all and end-all, when they don’t examine culture at all. 

At best, they give you a snapshot of how employees feel at a certain point in time. But they don’t measure the deeper, systemic factors that make up your culture. At worst, they paint a rosier picture than reality.

Not convinced? Let’s unpack it for a moment.

Depending on who you ask, a ‘good’ employee engagement score is anything from the mid-70s to the high-90s. With data from Culture Amp indicating that 71% of Australian employees are engaged, things must be going pretty well, right?

Wrong. Australian businesses are struggling with turnover and retention like never before. 

We’re experiencing the highest job mobility rate in a decade and we’re witnessing a new phenomenon known as ‘quiet quitting,’ in which people are quietly disengaging from their work while staying on the payroll.

So something’s not quite adding up, is it?

Think about it: 

• We celebrate an employee engagement score of 70% and then scratch our heads in bafflement when our best people start leaving; and 
• We think if the majority of our employees are engaged, our culture must be in good shape and then we’re surprised when productivity doesn’t lift or we don’t see as much innovation as we’d like.

Einstein said the definition of madness was doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result and when it comes to using engagement scores to measure culture, we might just be a little bit mad.

So, what’s going wrong?

Problem 1: We’re not examining culture at all

At its root, culture is an anthropological term, yet in recent years it’s become synonymous with ‘engagement’ in the business world. Culture is about how we behave as humans in groups. It’s the values, beliefs, and behaviours that define us as a group. 

Engagement, on the other hand, is an individual state. When we use engagement scores to measure culture, we’re actually measuring how engaged our individual employees are. And while the two concepts are related, they’re not the same thing. 

It would be like trying to measure the health of a person by asking them how they’re feeling at this very moment. You might get some useful information, but you’re not going to get the full picture.

Problem 2: More often than not, they don’t lead to change

Just like a customer survey doesn’t change a customer experience, an engagement survey doesn’t change culture. If you truly want to understand your culture to change it for the better, a survey — any survey — won’t do it. This is where many organisations fall down — they do an engagement survey, see the results and then do nothing about it because they don’t have the data or information to take action.

So, where does that leave us? How can we get a true measure of our culture if employee engagement scores don’t cut it?

Now that we’re thinking about employee engagement (a conversation that’s been deeply lacking), we need to get smarter about how we’re diagnosing culture and think more strategically about culture design. We need to avoid adding more surveys and performative HR initiatives to an already exhausted workforce and hoping for a different result. 

Here’s what you should be thinking about instead:

1. Ditch the behaviour-centric approach in favour of a systemic one

   It starts with ditching the behaviour-centric approach (or psychology-based/engagement) in favour of a systemic one (anthropological/sociological-based) and understanding that culture is not about how people feel, it’s about how they behave as a group. 

   It’s the values, beliefs and behaviours that define us as a group. It’s the unspoken rules that everyone follows. It’s how we treat each other, how we make decisions and how we show up every day. Once we understand this, we can start to look at culture in a more holistic way– one that takes into account the organisation as a whole rather than just its individual parts.

2. You need to think like an anthropologist

   You’ve watched the documentaries. How do they start to understand a culture? They don’t do a survey. They do an ethnographic research project that spans years to deeply understand the shared beliefs and behaviours. And… they don’t seek change. Just to understand. 

   And when it comes to organisational culture, you can’t change what you don’t understand. And if you want to understand your culture, then you need to take an anthropological view. This means going deep and understanding employees over an extended period of time. This will give you a much richer understanding of your culture than any engagement survey ever could. Don’t have time? Hire a culture anthropologist (AKA someone like me!).

3. Take a village approach

   Just as it takes a village to create a business culture, it takes a village to understand it, unpack it, and evolve it. Yet in most organisations, it’s left to HR to understand and manage ‘culture’ and limited by time, money and internal expertise. But if you want to get a clear understanding of your culture, then you need to involve as many people as possible in the process.

4. Read the room and think about the individual ‘experience of work’

   Engagement surveys are a snapshot in time, but what’s the true experience of work in your organisation? To understand this, you need to look at the day-to-day experiences of your employees and people. Do they feel appreciated and valued? Can they bring their whole selves to work and know they will be supported? Do they find their work meaningful? 

   These are the things that matter when it comes to culture, not an engagement score.

   Culture is not a survey. It’s not an engagement score. It’s not something you can change with a quick fix or magic pill. It’s time we stopped relying on engagement scores alone to understand what’s going on with our employees and start thinking about culture in a more holistic, strategic way. Only then can we create the kind of cultures that attract, retain and engage the best talent.