Creating a Culture of Engagement: Simple Steps for Lasting Transformation

Leading a culture transformation demands strategic action and consistent leadership. This guide explores how leaders can align teams, boost employee engagement, and implement lasting cultural change.

It’s like nailing Jello to a tree. That’s what a senior leader once told me when I asked him how his culture efforts were going.

Like him, you may fully agree with the myriads of studies that prove a great culture creates great company performance, and possibly even feel envious of those companies that are ‘lucky’ enough to have their culture working so well that it’s driving their success.

Like most leaders, you may also think transforming a culture is so nebulous, it’s impossible to get your arms around it. It feels much easier to implement a new enterprise system for your company than it is to implement a new culture. After all, at least those types of tactical projects have tasks and due dates – something you can actually manage! I mean, how do you manage a culture project? How do you know when you’re done? How do you even measure it?

Maybe you can’t even imagine how a culture that’s been formed over decades can ever be transformed at all. It might feel like carving a tunnel through a mountain when all you have is a chisel.

Or maybe you think your culture is fine the way it is. After all, everyone seems to be getting along, right? So what’s the problem?

The Hidden Costs of Disengagement

If you think any of this, you’re not alone. Culture and employee engagement seem to be a mystery to a lot of leaders. A Duke University study found that only 22% of all leaders truly understand why their employees are feeling disengaged.

The Customer Management Practice published a leadership study where 84% of all leaders thought they’ve already improved their employee engagement. That same year, the annual Gallup poll showed that 69% of all employees felt disengaged, and 16% admitted to actively sabotaging their company’s success.

A recent study showed that 31% of employees openly admitted to actively sabotaging their company’s AI initiatives and 16% of them admitted to ignoring all the security leaks that they came across. That’s a scary statistic for all of us.

Culture and employee engagement can be the silent killer to a company’s success in a competitive market. It might be hard to spot, because your employees, for the most part, are doing what’s required, but there’s a big difference between doing what’s required and giving you their extra effort. It’s that ‘lost opportunity’ cost that’s sometimes hard to measure or even be aware of, but it can create the difference between average performance and top quartile performance for your company.

The Power of Leadership Consistency in Culture Transformation

The difference is startling. I don’t know a CEO in the world that wouldn’t want to know how to improve their revenue over 20%, or customer loyalty over 200%, like the studies show between companies in the top quartile of employee engagement and those in the bottom quartile.

So how do you transform your culture? How do you even begin and how do you ‘manage’ a culture transformation project?

The legendary tennis player, Arthur Ashe, had a saying that answers that question perfectly: ‘Start from where you are.’

Make a decision to try and then make it a priority, just like you would with implementing a system integration project. Great cultures don’t happen by accident. It takes a proactive approach and an executable plan to implement the strategies that reliably create a culture of engagement.

Like any other time you’ve decided to try something new, you first begin with learning how to do it. Industry-vetted online culture building courses like the Alignment Advantage Group’s ‘7 Cs to Success’ can be learned in about an hour a day in less than a week and include executable strategies that are proven to create a culture of engagement that drives success.

Why Everyone in Your Organisation Plays a Role

You may seriously doubt that by just taking one short online course, you can learn everything you need to know to create a fully aligned culture of engagement of happy and productive employees.

And that you’d need a whole team of people dedicated to transforming your culture to make it actually work. Well, okay, on that last point, you’d be absolutely right. You DO need a whole team of dedicated people to transform your culture, but the good news is you already have them. They are every formal and informal leader in your organisation. And their actions are critical to the success of your culture transformation.

Training all of them on an executable culture program like the 7 Cs to Success creates a common language and a common leadership mindset that builds consistency in your interactions with your employees.

If you don’t have that consistency, the climate on one leader’s team may be completely different than the culture you’re trying to create. The integrity of your intentions can then be put into question, and your employees can lose faith and trust in your vision.

‘It takes a village’ to create a successful culture of engagement, which is one of the foundational beliefs taught in the 7 Cs to Success training. Everyone in your organisation is responsible and everyone plays a part. The good news is that for this project, everyone is motivated to participate. The even better news is that it’s not nearly as hard as you think.

By taking just a few proactive steps and implementing proven strategies that are scalable to any size organisation in any industry, your company can quickly become one of those companies ‘lucky’ enough to have their culture drive their success.

It’s not that hard, but it does take an intentional effort. Once it starts, you’ll be amazed at how fast that one decision to act can create a systemic ‘ripple effect’ across your entire organisation. All you need to do is just ‘start from where you are.’

ALSO READ: CX Strategy is Only as Good as Your Willingness to Change