Our research found that, across 50 engagement drivers, the further employees were from the top of their organization, the less engaged they felt—by a wide margin. This highlights the need for a way to change culture that truly reaches and involves the whole organization, not just the top.
Culture is a powerful and sustainable source of advantage.
It’s a bigger driver of job satisfaction than salary, and the biggest driver of attrition. Companies with strong innovation cultures are 60% more likely to be innovation leaders. More than four out of five executives believe an ineffective culture increases the chances of unethical behavior.
Glassdoor, MIT, BCG, Journal of Financial Economics
For most organizations, the culture they want feels out of reach.
This is true both for leaders and their employees. According to the Journal of Financial Economics, 92% of surveyed executives believed that improving corporate culture would increase firm value—while 84% believed their company needed to improve their culture. For employees, the percentage who reported feeling connected to their company’s culture has remained flat at just above 20% for the last four years, according to Gallup.
Journal of Financial Economics, Gallup
What makes culture work so hard?
In our research on the employee experience, we uncovered a pattern that may help us understand the real challenge we need to tackle. We observed that, across 50 drivers of the employee experience, the further you get from the top of an organization, the less connected and engaged employees tend to feel.
We’ve color-coded the data to show you how persistent this pattern is. Check out the methodology behind the numbers on page 32 of our longitudinal study, “Employees Rising: Advocacy, Activism, Agency.”
There is a 26% difference between the average engagement score of an organization’s leadership team (84%) and its individual contributors (58%).
The data makes sense when you consider how culture work has always been done—and it illuminates the pain points leaders and practitioners should address to help their organizations build and maintain healthy, high-performing cultures.
PAIN POINT #1
One-time, one-way decisions
Discussions about changing an organization’s culture tend to happen once among a small group. And once decisions are made, the work tends to focus on alerting and aligning people—versus truly engaging them in the process.
PAIN POINT #2
Words over actions
The main work products of culture change are presentations that capture intent—versus targeted actions designed to quickly build momentum and drive measurable progress.
PAIN POINT #3
Mission: impossible
The responsibility of using those work products to galvanize a workforce behind the new culture tends to rest with a few under-equipped leaders—most often leaders in middle and front-line management.
Today’s version of culture work is like building a bonfire. Leaders build it big and build it once. And the further away you are, the less light and warmth you feel. And it’s clear the bonfire approach isn’t working. The gap between what leaders say and what people experience is widening. This impacts trust both inside and outside the company.
Inside organizations, assumptions at the top tend to be rosier than the reality for the rest of employees, according to research from PwC: “86% of leaders think employee trust is high, compared to 67% of employees who say they highly trust their employer. This employee trust gap of 18 points is higher than in the past.”
Outside, the gap between leaders and customers is even more pronounced: “90% of business executives think customers highly trust their companies while only 30% of consumers actually do.”
For culture work to succeed, we should think of it like building a thousand campfires. Leaders hand out kindling, so the fire is sparked where people already are. Everyone can create it. Everyone can look after it. And the warmth reaches everyone who needs it. How could you do this? We suggest that you follow two principles when thinking about culture change. First, make it simple. Then, help it spread.
Principle 1: Make it Simple.
Focus the work on the vital few areas that drive the greatest, most immediate impact on your organization’s culture. In other words, focus on “The Why and The Way” of your organization.
The Why is your guiding ambition. It can be as big as aligning to a new brand or merging two organizations. Or it can be as focused and surgical as a commitment to being the category’s top customer service brand.
The Way is a set of nine critical behaviors you need working toward your ambition. Here’s a canvas showing “The Why and The Way” together.
Nine behaviors drive culture change.
We identified these nine behaviors based on our decades of collective experience and successful culture change engagements with leading organizations. These behaviors act as the building blocks of any organization’s culture. Through these 9 lenses, we can see how well your organization delivers on your guiding ambition—then take targeted action to unblock the path to performance.
Lead
- Prioritize: What does the organization signal is most important to focus on, implicitly and explicitly?
- Measure: How does the organization measure success for the business and its people?
- Reward: What kind of work is recognized and encouraged?
Organize
- Communicate: How is information stored, shared, and used to work toward the organization’s goals?
- Collaborate: How do people work together and to what degree are they autonomous?
- Resolve: How does conflict arise and get resolved?
Evolve
- Grow: How do individuals develop and progress in the organization?
- Monitor: How well does the organization perceive opportunities and threats and how willing it is to change in response to them?
- Adapt: How well does the organization change in reaction to the perceived opportunities and threats?
Principle 2: Help it Spread.
Work with a bias toward bottom-up action, not only top-down communication, so that we build agency in the people who have the greatest impact on the employee experience: middle managers, for three reasons.
They are trusted. Our research shows that managers and their peers are the top two most trusted sources of information. 60% of hybrid knowledge workers report their direct manager is one of the top two influences on their connection to corporate culture.
They have an outsized impact. Employees who have managers who listen to them and are committed to their success are an average of 3.3X more likely to agree across the 50 measured drivers of employee experience, and 58% less interested in leaving their job tomorrow than employees who don’t.
They need support. Managers are the gatekeepers of change. Change spreads only with their support. To gain that support, we need to invest in their agency—meaning they need to:
- See how they contribute to a future they believe in.
- Have the means to make a positive impact.
- Feel valued because of their work.
By making culture work simpler and focusing efforts on specific outcomes, this approach makes culture tangible and actionable, at the same time connecting the changes in behavior to intended business results.
Galvanizing employee communities across the organization to co-create and spread culture requires leaders to part with the idea that they need to control culture and allow their teams to carry the spark, but the result — empowered, engaged teams inspired by your strategic intent — is worth the risk.
