Culture and Engagement

You can't engagement-survey your way out of a bad culture.

Culture isn't your values poster. Engagement isn't your annual survey. And neither belongs solely to HR.

Updated September 2026

Let's imagine a company.

One of its values is Trust. It's written on the website. It's mentioned during ‘Induction’. It's probably on a wall somewhere in a nice font.

Unfortunately, managers need three levels of approval to spend £50.

People are expected to be online at very specific times. Decisions are routinely second-guessed. And senior leaders occasionally ask whether somebody working from home is actually working.

The company doesn't have a trust problem because employees haven't understood the values. Employees have understood them perfectly.

They've just noticed that nobody actually behaves that way. And your behaviours are everything.

Welcome to company culture.

You already have a culture

Every organisation has one. Even if you've never deliberately created it. Culture is simply how things really work around here.

It's how decisions get made. How managers behave. What happens when somebody makes a mistake. Whether people can disagree with the boss. Who gets promoted. What gets celebrated. What gets ignored.

What happens when someone behaves terribly but delivers brilliant numbers. And what employees say about the company when nobody senior is in the room.

That's your culture.

The values on the website might describe what you’d like it to be.

But they don't create it.

And then there's engagement

·      Employee engagement has become an enormous industry.

·      Surveys.

·      Pulse surveys.

·      Platforms.

·      Recognition schemes.

·      Wellbeing imitatives. 

·      Away days.

·      Newsletters.

·      Employee networks.

·      Town halls.

·      Breakfasts.

·      Pizza.

We have nothing against pizza.

But none of those things automatically creates engagement. Because engagement isn't something HR does to employees. It's what happens when people understand what they're contributing to, feel reasonably valued for doing it, have some confidence in the people leading them and believe their work actually matters. You can't manufacture that with an initiative. You have to create the conditions for it.

The annual engagement survey

We're not terribly interested in your engagement score. At least, not on its own.

Imagine your engagement score is 71%. Excellent. Or terrible. We have absolutely no idea. What matters is what's underneath it.

Perhaps one team scores 94% and another scores 38%. Perhaps your newest employees love working there and people who've been around for three years are leaving. Perhaps people really like their colleagues but have no confidence whatsoever in senior leadership. Perhaps everybody says communication is terrible.

Again. For the fourth year running.

That's where engagement data becomes useful. Not as a score to put on a board slide. As somewhere to start asking better questions.

Please don't ask if you don't want the answer

There's something particularly dispiriting about an organisation asking employees for feedback and then doing absolutely nothing with it.

"We heard you."

Lovely. What are you going to do?

Not every employee suggestion needs to become policy. Sometimes the answer genuinely has to be no. (and we’ve seen many a terrible employee suggestion).

But if you ask people what they think, you should be prepared to tell them:

• What you heard.

• What you're going to change.

• What you're not going to change.

• And why.

Otherwise, don't be terribly surprised when fewer people bother completing the next survey.

Culture lives in the little things

Businesses sometimes assume culture needs a big initiative. Usually, it doesn't. It shows up in surprisingly ordinary moments.

A new employee asks a question they think might be stupid.

What happens?

Someone makes a genuine mistake.

What happens?

An employee disagrees with a senior leader.

What happens?

A brilliant performer treats their colleagues badly.

What happens?

Someone says they're struggling.

What happens?

A manager has to choose between doing the right thing and hitting this month's number.

What happens?

Those moments tell employees considerably more about your culture than anything written in your employee handbook.

Your managers are your culture

That's slightly unfair. But only slightly. For most employees, their experience of the company is heavily influenced by the person managing them. A brilliant manager can make a fairly ordinary organisation feel like a fantastic place to work. A terrible manager can make a brilliant organisation unbearable.

That's why manager capability isn't just an L&D issue. It's a culture issue.

If your managers don't know how to give feedback, deal with poor performance, recognise good work, have difficult conversations, support development or simply talk to people like adults, an engagement initiative isn't going to compensate for it.

Develop your managers. Then expect something from them.

Recognition doesn't need a platform

People like being appreciated. This is not particularly groundbreaking. But recognition has somehow become rather complicated; Points, badges, leaderboards, digital applause, monthly shout outs.

We're not against any of those things if employees genuinely enjoy them.

But sometimes recognition is simply a manager noticing that somebody has done something well and saying:

"That was really good. Thank you."

Preferably while remembering what they actually did.

If one of your values is collaboration, recognise collaboration. If it's customer focus, notice people doing brilliant things for customers. If it's innovation, don't punish somebody the first time an innovative idea doesn't work.

What you reward tells people what you really value.

Be careful what you tolerate

This is probably more important. Every organisation has behaviours it claims aren't acceptable. The interesting question is what happens when someone displays them. Especially if that person is:

·      A top performer.

·      A senior leader.

·      Difficult to replace.

·      Good with clients.

Or mates with somebody important.

If poor behaviour is tolerated because somebody delivers results, that becomes part of your culture too. And everybody notices. Your values are tested when enforcing them is inconvenient, not when it's easy.

Development matters

People don't necessarily expect their employer to map out the next twenty years of their career. They do generally want to feel they're going somewhere. That might mean promotion. But it could equally mean learning something new, taking on a project, getting exposure to another part of the business, being coached by somebody experienced or simply becoming really good at what they already do.

Talk to people about what they want. You may discover something useful.

Radical, we know.

What about wellbeing?

Wellbeing absolutely matters. But again, look at the conditions rather than immediately reaching for an initiative. If employees are routinely working ridiculous hours because you're understaffed, a lunchtime mindfulness webinar probably isn't the intervention we'd start with. If managers are contacting people throughout their holidays, an app isn't fixing that. If nobody feels able to admit they're overwhelmed, free fruit isn't going to make much difference.

Sometimes wellbeing means yoga. Sometimes it means fixing the workload. Sometimes it just means managers genuinely caring about how their people are doing. Know which problem you're solving.

Culture gets interesting when things go wrong

Anyone can talk about values when business is good. Culture becomes much more visible when things aren't. A restructure, difficult financial year, redundancies, major mistake, a missed target, a leadership change.

That's when employees discover whether all those things they've been told about honesty, respect, transparency and putting people first actually mean anything. You won't always be able to give people the outcome they want. But you can usually be clear,

you can usually be fair. And you can always treat people like adults.

Digital People HR says…

Stop trying to engage employees.

That wording has always bothered us slightly. People aren't an audience waiting for HR to come up with something sufficiently entertaining.

Instead, create an organisation worth engaging with.

·      Give people decent managers.

·      Make expectations clear.

·      Deal with poor behaviour.

·      Recognise good work.

·      Give people opportunities.

·      Listen when they tell you something isn't working.

·      Explain decisions.

·      Do what you say you're going to do.

And don't put Trust on the wall unless you're prepared to actually trust people.

You might still want an engagement survey. You might even want the pizza. But neither of them is your culture. Your culture is what happens afterwards.

Wondering what your employees would say about your culture?

We can help you find out.

Digital People HR works with growing businesses to understand what's really happening underneath engagement scores, values and employee feedback — and, more importantly, what to do about it.

That might mean looking at leadership and management capability, employee listening, behaviours, recognition, ways of working or simply the things everybody knows aren't quite right but nobody has tackled yet.

Get in touch.

We won't start by recommending a wellbeing app.

Well, probably not.