Employee Engagement & Organizational Culture: What’s the Difference and Why Does It Matter?

The terms employee engagement and organizational culture are often used interchangeably by human resources professionals, employees, and leaders. Indeed, engagement and culture are inextricably linked. In organizations with great company cultures, employees will typically report being more engaged. Additionally, highly engaged employees will usually report they work in a great company culture.

Although employee engagement and company culture are highly related, they differ from each other important ways, especially when it comes to closing gaps and making improvements.

However, despite the strong relationship between the two constructs, engagement and culture are distinct from each other in important ways. These differences matter, especially when organizations see gaps or are looking to make improvements.

Organizations should not think that they can focus on only culture or only engagement but still improve both. Rather, both culture and engagement require distinct ways of defining, measuring, and making improvements. To help with this, we have developed a table (see right) that lays out some of the key differences between these two important constructs. In this article, I will briefly discuss how both constructs are defined, measured, and improved.

Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is defined as the underlying beliefs, values, and behaviors that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization. Put simply, culture explains “how we do things around here.” Every organization has a culture, whether it is developed intentionally or not. Without leadership’s vision and guidance, company culture likely won’t be aligned with and drive the organization’s mission and values, and may actually work against them.

To measure organizational culture, organizations must first know what they want the culture to be. Because each organization has its own unique cultural components, we recommend first developing a vision for culture that is aligned with and drives the organizational mission and goals. Using that vision as a guide, organizations can next determine the employee behaviors that are consistent with and illustrate the cultural vision. In other words, these are the behaviors an organizations’ employees should exhibit if the right culture is in place. These behaviors can then be measured in a variety of ways (e.g., surveys, performance management ratings) to determine in which areas of culture the company is doing well and where gaps exist.

Changing organizational culture is an ongoing, slow process that requires attitude and behavior change at all levels of the organization. Leaders must model the kinds of values and behaviors they want to see realized in the rest of the organization. In other words, leaders must “walk the talk.” The organization itself might also need to be modified to support the cultural changes. That is, organizations must be willing to identify what current systems, policies, procedures, and rules need to be changed so alignment with the new values and desired culture can be achieved. Finally, organizations must also incentivize the behaviors that are consistent with the desired culture and discourage those that are not to ensure everyone is moving toward the same end goal.

Employee Engagement

Employee engagement on the other hand, is defined as the degree to which employees are mentally and emotionally invested in their work and in contributing to the organization’s overall success. Thus, employee engagement is primarily focused on employees’ individual experiences at work. Engagement explains “how I feel about the way I am expected to do things around here to execute organizational strategy.”

Many models for employee engagement can be found that describe the different components of engagement. At C1C, we believe employee engagement is a combination of employees’ job satisfaction, pride and passion for what they do, their intent to stay with the organization, their discretionary effort at work, and whether they would recommend the organization as a good place to work.

Because organizations cannot directly improve employees’ engagement (e.g., we cannot directly make employees intend to stay with the organization), they must focus on the parts of the organizational environment they can change and that drive or influence employee engagement. To do this, we highly recommend that in addition to employee engagement, organizations also measure the known drivers of engagement (e.g., supervisor quality, development opportunities, feelings of appreciation) and then use analyses to determine where the strongest relationships exist. Organizations can then focus their resources for improvement in those areas to drive higher levels of employee engagement.

Conclusion

Although employee engagement and company culture are highly related and overlapping constructs, they differ from each other important ways, especially when it comes to closing gaps and making improvements within an organization. Organizations must differentiate the way they define, measure, and improve each of these to ensure real change can be made. If you have questions or would like to talk about engagement and culture further, feel free to reach out!