How Are Values, Culture, Experience & Engagement Different?

Here’s a riddle: Why do organizations invest so much in employee engagement, and yet still struggle to improve the very thing they invest in?

One reason is that we often confuse four very different concepts: values, culture, employee experience, and employee engagement. They're frequently used interchangeably, as though they're different names for the same thing.

They're closely related, but they each play a different role in how organizations perform.

• Values anchor culture.
• Culture shapes experiences. 
• Experiences produce engagement. 
• Engagement drives business results. 

When organizations understand how these concepts work together, they stop trying to manufacture engagement and instead, intentionally design the values, culture and experiences that naturally produce it.

The secret link? Congruence. Ensuring alignment across each of these is what threads them together whereas incongruence between them creates a gap that will always lead to disengagement.

You know you want employee engagement because engaged people contribute more, care more deeply about the outcomes, collaborate more effectively, remain more invested. So, many organizations try to improve engagement by launching yet another initiative.

A new recognition program. A wellness campaign. A manager training program.

Each of those efforts can absolutely add value, but if they aren't connected to the organization's culture and expressed consistently throughout the employee experience, they're unlikely to create lasting engagement.

Engagement isn't something organizations can do. It's something they get in exchange for something else.

When leaders understand the relationship between culture, experience, and engagement, they stop asking, "How do we improve engagement?"

They begin by moving upstream:

• Are our values authentic? 
• Are those values consistently reflected in day to day behaviors? 
• Do our employee experiences reinforce or contradict this culture?  

Then, engagement becomes an outcome, rather than the thing you are trying to create.

Organizational values are the authentic beliefs that guide your organizational decisions. They are the answer to questions like “what actually matters here?” and “what standards do we uphold?” and “what should people expect about how things get done?”

Examples of values could be transparency, trust, connectedness, learning, accountability, resilience, service, innovation.

But, naming a value doesn’t make it real. It needs to be the guiding anchor for how you operate on a day to day basis - which brings us to culture.

I think of an organization’s culture as the collective expression of those values into behaviors. Or, put another way, it’s “who we are” as an organization. 

Culture can be seen and felt in what leaders reinforce, what the organization rewards, what behaviors are tolerated or not, and how people interact when no one is staring at the values statement.

If transparency is a value, then the culture likely is one where leaders share information instead of guard it.

If development is a value, then the culture is one where people receive time, support, and opportunity to grow, learn, and take risks.

If connectedness is a value, then the culture is one where people make collaborative decisions and are rewarded for teaming.

Culture, then, is where values move from aspiration to observable behavior. 

Employees experience the culture not as an abstract but as a collection of definable, meaningful moments.

The candidate experience.

The onboarding experience.

The learning experience.

Experience bleeds into performance feedback, recognition, compensation and rewards, career growth, employee relations. Even departure.

Every one of these experiences either reinforces the culture or contradicts it. 

Every one of these experiences either reinforces the culture or contradicts it. That's why employee experience (EX) as a practice isn't simply about the talent llifecycle, or only about making work enjoyable or satisfying, just as much as it’s not only about the physical setting or the tech stack. Instead, it's about intentionally designing experiences that consistently express the organization's culture.

Employee engagement is the result of what comes before it, it’s not something you can program or create directly.

When employees repeatedly experience an organization whose behavior is consistent with its stated values, trust and engagement can grow. On the flip side, when they experience inconsistency and incongruence, engagement weakens.

An organization may say it values people while rewarding leaders who burn them out. Or it may say it values learning while penalizing the people who take time to develop or ask about growth opportunities.

Employees notice these contradictions and incongruencies. This is why, when people consistently experience a culture that is authentic, supportive, and aligned with how the organization actually operates, engagement naturally increases.

Engagement, then, is one of the earliest outcomes of a well-designed organization. And, engaged employees invest more discretionary effort, collaborate more effectively, care more deeply about outcomes, stay longer. Over time, this builds organizational performance and capability.

Those outcomes don't happen because an engagement initiative was successful. They happen because culture and employee experience have consistently reinforced one another.

The biggest misconception is treating values, culture, employee experience, and engagement as interchangeable and unimportant processes.

Values aren’t just statements on a wall or screensaver, culture is not just a collection of employee programs, employee experience isn’t just the talent lifecycle and engagement isn’t something you can create.

Instead, engagement is one of the earliest outcomes of consistently positive experiences that reinforce the organization's culture and values.

And when the distinctions between values, culture, employee experience, and employee engagement become blurred, organizations often focus on improving engagement directly instead of improving the experiences that create it.

The best place to start is by defining the values that anchor your organization. If you already have them, audit them to ensure they accurately reflect what you believe rather than are aspirational-only.

If you don’t already have values codified, begin to identify what it is that genuinely guides decisions and actions at your organization. Don’t use other organizations’ values statements or suggestions from a book; instead, honestly assess what you believe about people and work, what principles look like even under pressure, which are essential to achieving your organizational purpose.

Then, translate those into behaviors. What does each value look like when leaders and employees live it out. And, what does the opposite look like? Ask if there is a gap between what you say you value and what employees actually experience. 

Do you say connection matters but only reward individual results?

Do you say innovation matters but discourage risk taking?

Do you say transparency and trust matter while withholding context?

Then work to integrate those behaviors, and address congruence gaps, through every aspect of the employee experience:

• How do they get reflected in attraction and hiring, onboarding, coaching and career growth, workload decisions, performance feedback, employee relations, rewards and recognition, leadership style? 
• How do they show up in communications, meeting norms, job design?

When you are ready to assess engagement, don’t chase a score in isolation. Treat it as an employee listening strategy. Seek to understand if your upstream design is working; seek to understand what low engagement scores may be telling you about values, culture, or experiences. 

Organizations often ask me to improve engagement or define the culture. We almost never start there. Instead, I co-create to uncover the culture the organization is trying to build, examine whether employees experience that culture consistently throughout their journey, and identify where those experiences reinforce, or undermine, the organization's intent. When looking at engagement, I help design questions and follow-up mechanism that aren’t about a survey for the sake of a survey, but about conditions and actions that uncover what is already there. 

Often, I work backwards. First, we clarifying the authentic values and cultural expectations that define the organization; translating those beliefs into observable leadership and employee behaviors; identifying where the culture is consistently reinforced (or not); and then that may lead us to redesign leadership expectations, candidate experience, onboarding, employee listening, recognition, performance management, communication, career growth, or the way work itself is organized.

But the objective is not to add more programs. It’s to create greater congruence, aligning values, culture, and employee experience so that engagement has a strong foundation on which to grow.

And when they do not, no amount of engagement activity will compensate for the disconnect.

Values anchor culture; culture shapes experiences; experiences produce engagement; engagement drives results. And over time, those results build organizational capability.

That's why I believe engagement is core to a talent-centric organization.