The grave and costly confusion between measuring ‘climate’ rather than critical components of the ‘corporate culture’ through engagement surveys.

'Engagement scores and employee opinions surveys essentially measure how “happy” employees are with the organisation. Employees’ happiness is an important but not sufficient ingredient for executing the organisation’s strategy. As opposed to climate measures, culture indicators measure whether employees are receiving clear messages about how they are expected to behave,' says Katharine McLennan, Leadership and Team Practice Leader at Mettle Group. 'These behavioural expectations should be the behaviours that support the strategy and its execution, not so much how “happy” employees are with their boss, their job or whether they are thinking of leaving.'

'One of the major reasons employees leave an organisation is due to the culture, that is, there is confusion as to the strategy and/or values of the organisation or how an employee's behavior is expected to align to the values, or there are mixed messages and symbols from management and, therefore, there is no emotional connection to the organisation by the employee,' she said.

Retaining—let alone attracting—staff has been identified as one of the key challenges facing managers and business leaders today. Katharine suggests, 'If you don’t get the culture right, you will continue to lose people and need to spend enormous amounts of money on recruitment. Business leaders regularly attest to significant cost savings, once they got the culture right. One leading financial institution in Australia suggested the savings as being in the vicinity of $50M.'

This time of year, being the time of performance reviews, should focus on the individual, the organisation and the overall cultural fit of your people. 'It is important to identify the individual’s career aspirations and how this fits with the strategy and culture of the organisation. There must be alignment between the individual and the culture. You will only know how this alignment will work once you know what culture you have,' Katharine said. 'You will get a culture whether you like it or not; therefore, it is better to have a culture by design rather than by default' says Mettle Group's Chief Executive Office Ian Basser. Ian says, 'Culture is not identified through employee engagement surveys. Just because an employee is happy, it does not mean that they are accountable, for example. When an employee actually understands the brand and value proposition of the organisation and is passionately aligned to it, they will not only buy into the company’s objectives but also perpetuate the culture and perform well,' he said.

Further challenges organisations are facing with engagement scores and employee opinion surveys is what to do with all the data and how leaders of the organisations should interpret and ‘act’ on the results.

To put it simply, Katharine suggests, 'The surveys need to be able to provide, in the end, a series of recommendations that enable leaders to plan and make considered choices of which cultural messages to send to support the specific strategy and how to reinforce these messages through different channels throughout the organisation. These channels include the leaders' own leadership behaviours, as well as clearly enunciated mindsets for the organisation and clearly spelled out behavioural expectations for all employees. It should also extend to organisational design and job design, people systems such as remuneration and performance appraisal, and symbols such as architecture, rewards, how to run meetings and so forth.'

If the data from whatever survey tool organisations choose to use is not interpreted or used properly, the entire survey process can turn into an expensive, time-consuming pure data collecting exercise with no return or value add to the employees or the organisation. 'If employees are constantly asked to complete surveys without seeing measures of impact on themselves or the organisation, you will start to receive inaccurate data from the outset,' says Katharine.