Designing for Engagement: How to Move from Culture Awareness to Culture Action
There's a moment I've witnessed in organizations more times than I can count. Someone reads a Gallup report. They see that only one in three employees is engaged at work. They feel the weight of that number because they recognize it in their own building, on their own team, in the quiet resignation they sometimes catch on someone's face during a staff meeting.
And then they say: We need to do something about our culture.
That impulse is exactly right. The problem is what usually happens next.
They commission an engagement survey. They plan a team-building day. They create a recognition program. They update their values statement. They do all of these things with genuine intention. And then six months later, not much has changed.
This is the engagement paradox: organizations know that culture matters for engagement, but they treat the symptoms instead of the system. And culture is, at its core, a system. It has structures, norms, feedback loops, and deep histories. You cannot bolt engagement onto a culture that is producing disengagement and expect it to hold.
In a previous article titled Culture Is the Condition: How Organizational Culture Shapes Employee Engagement, I laid out what employee engagement actually is and identified the three cultural conditions that most powerfully determine whether it flourishes: psychological safety, meaningful connection to purpose, and a sense that one's growth and contribution genuinely matter. If you haven't read that article yet, I'd invite you to start there. It provides an important foundation for what I want to say today.
Because today, I want to move us from diagnosis to design.
Understanding that culture drives engagement is necessary. But it's not sufficient. What leaders actually need is a way to do something with that understanding: to look honestly at the culture they've built (or inherited, or allowed to develop by default) and begin making intentional changes that create the conditions for people to bring their best.
That's what this post is about.
First: Understand What Your Culture Is Actually Producing
Before you can change your culture, you have to be honest about what it is.
This sounds obvious, but in practice it is surprisingly hard. Most leaders have a story about their organizational culture that is shaped by what they intend it to be, not necessarily what people on the ground are experiencing. The values on the website say "we are a collaborative, people-centered organization." The staff surveys say people don't feel heard and don't trust that leadership follows through.
Both of those things can be true at the same time... and they usually are.
One of the frameworks I return to most often in my organizational development work is borrowed from organizational systems thinking: a system is perfectly designed to produce the results it's getting. This principle, often attributed to W. Edwards Deming, is both clarifying and a little uncomfortable. It means that if your organization is experiencing high turnover, chronic burnout, low engagement, or persistent team conflict, then those outcomes are not accidents. They are the logical output of systems and cultural norms that have, perhaps without anyone's full awareness, been optimized to produce them.
That realization is where genuine culture change begins.
In my doctoral research on organizational culture and work environments, I found that one of the most significant barriers to culture change in schools and nonprofits is what I'd call cultural blind spots at the leadership level. That is the gap between how leaders perceive the culture and how staff experience it. When that gap is large, engagement initiatives inevitably miss the mark because they're solving the wrong problem.
So the first step is an honest culture audit. Not an annual engagement survey that gets reported as a score and then filed away. A real reckoning with what your organization's norms, systems, and leadership behaviors are communicating to people about their value.
Here are the questions I often start with when working with organizations:
When people bring a problem to leadership, what usually happens next? (Are they thanked? Ignored? Held responsible for solving it alone?)
Whose voices are consistently centered in decision-making, and whose are consistently absent?
How does the organization respond when someone makes a mistake? (With curiosity and support? With blame? With silence?)
What do people get rewarded for? And what gets overlooked?
Do staff members at every level know why their work matters? Not just what they do, but why it matters to the mission right now?
The honest answers to these questions gathered from people at every level of the organization will tell you more about your culture than any values statement ever could. And they will tell you exactly where to focus.
The Leader's Role: You Are the Climate
Here's something I need to say plainly, because I think it sometimes gets softened in the name of being kind to leaders who are already stretched thin:
You cannot build a culture of engagement without leadership behavior change.
Culture is not primarily a policy. It is not a program. It is not a rebranding initiative. Culture is the accumulated pattern of what people experience when they interact with their organization's systems and leaders every single day. And the single most powerful shaper of that experience is leadership behavior.
Think about what this actually means. When you say you value psychological safety, but you respond defensively when a staff member raises a concern in a meeting. Your behavior has just told your team more about your culture than any policy document could. When you say people are your greatest asset, but you consistently cut professional development from the budget when things get tight, then your budget has told the truth your words tried to cover.
Leadership behavior either reinforces the culture you want or undermines it. There is no neutral position.
In a conversation with Dan Leal on The Spring Forward Podcast (Episode 34, Hiring and Retention in Nonprofits), he made a point that has stayed with me: finding and keeping exceptional nonprofit talent requires organizations to value staff wellbeing as much as client outcomes. That's a cultural stance. It lives in how leaders make decisions when resources are limited and tradeoffs are real.
The same theme surfaced in Episode 37, Wellness for Nonprofit Leaders, where wellness expert Serena Sabala reminded us that self-care for leaders is not optional; it is mandatory for effective leadership. And I'd extend that even more because a leader who is burned out, reactive, and running on empty is not modeling the culture conditions that produce engagement. The way leaders care for themselves shapes how they care for others, and that ripples through the entire organizational climate.
Changing leadership behavior is not about becoming a different person. It is about becoming more intentional about the behaviors that shape the climate others experience. Three behavioral commitments that I've seen make an outsized difference:
Practice transparent communication, especially about hard things. When people understand the context for difficult decisions, they can stay engaged even when they're disappointed. When they're kept in the dark, they fill the vacuum with anxiety and distrust.
Create regular, genuine opportunities for staff to have a voice. Not feedback sessions where input gets collected and never referenced again. Actual practices where people can see their perspectives shaping decisions; even small ones count.
Acknowledge and name the work. This is simpler than leaders often make it. People need to hear, regularly and specifically, that what they're doing matters. And not a generic "great job" but a specific acknowledgment of the contribution and its connection to the mission.
Small Practices, Sustained Over Time: The Heart of Culture Design
Here is a question that I keep coming back to throughout my work: how do organizations build and sustain cultures of engagement not just in the moment, but over time and across teams?
What I've found, and what the broader organizational development literature consistently confirms, is that sustainable culture change rarely happens through grand gestures. It happens through small, consistent, human practices that are woven into how the organization operates every single day.
I call these culture practices, and they are different from programs. A program is something you launch and, inevitably, something you end. A culture practice is something you just... do. It becomes part of how people work together, and eventually, it becomes part of who you are as an organization.
Here are a few culture practices that I've seen make a genuine difference in engagement:
Start every meeting with a moment that reconnects people to purpose. This doesn't have to be long. It can be as simple as opening a staff meeting by asking: Who did we serve this week, and what did they need from us? That question asked consistently, genuinely, and with space for real answers keeps the mission alive in the room.
Build feedback loops that close. When a staff member gives feedback, they need to see what happened to it. "We heard X, and here's what we decided and why" is one of the most powerful culture practices I know. It tells people their voices matter beyond the survey.
Create structures for cross-team connection. Disengagement accelerates in isolation. When people don't know what their colleagues are working on, don't feel part of a larger organizational story, and see their work as disconnected from the whole, they disengage. Intentional structures for connection (brief cross-team check-ins, shared learning moments, visible recognition of collaborative work) counter this drift.
Name the culture you're building, out loud and often. This is something I talked about in the social media series this week: one of the most powerful things a leader can do is simply keep naming why the work matters. When people lose connection to purpose, the work becomes weight. When purpose is named regularly, it becomes fuel.
These are not complicated. They don't require a budget line. They require intention and consistency, and they require leaders to model them first.
What About the Generational Dimension?
Any honest conversation about employee engagement in 2026 has to reckon with the reality that today's workforce spans multiple generations, each with distinct expectations about what a good work environment looks like, what leadership should feel like, and what "engagement" even means to them.
In Episode 23 of The Spring Forward Podcast, Millennials and Gen Z in the Workplace, Dr. Jason Wiggins offered a perspective that's worth noting here. He challenged the stereotypes around younger workers, the idea that they're entitled or disloyal, and reframed what's actually happening: Millennials and Gen Z are not less committed to work. They are more committed to meaning. They want to know why the work matters, whether the organization's values are lived or just stated, and whether their development is genuinely supported.
That's a signal the organizations need to hear and respond to by building cultures where purpose is explicit, values are practiced, and development is real. That will have a significant advantage in both attracting and retaining talent.
The organizations that dismiss it, or treat it as a problem to manage rather than a prompt to grow, will continue to lose the people they can least afford to lose.
Where to Start: A Framework for Moving Forward
If you've read this far and you're feeling a combination of conviction and overwhelm — that's exactly right. Culture work is significant. It is not a weekend project. But it is also not as mysterious as it sometimes feels, and it does not require perfect conditions to begin.
Here is a simple framework I offer to organizations that are ready to move from awareness to action:
Step 1: Audit honestly. Use the questions I offered earlier. Gather input from multiple levels of the organization. Look for the gap between intended culture and experienced culture.
Step 2: Identify the most impactful areas for change. You cannot change everything at once. Based on your audit, where is the gap between your intended and experienced culture most significant? Where does leadership behavior most need to shift? Where are the missing feedback loops?
Step 3: Choose two or three culture practices and commit to them. Not a whole new program. Two or three specific, sustainable practices that you can start next week and maintain for six months.
Step 4: Create accountability. Culture change requires accountability structures, not just good intentions. Who is responsible for ensuring these practices happen consistently? How will you know if they're working?
Step 5: Revisit and adjust. This is where strategic planning and culture work intersect. Culture change is not a one-time intervention. It requires the same rhythms of check-in, reflection, and adjustment that make strategic planning effective.
A Word to the Tired Leader
I want to close with something personal, because I know that many of the people reading this are leaders who are already carrying a lot.
You are trying to fulfill a mission that matters deeply to you. You are navigating funding pressures, staffing challenges, board dynamics, and community needs, often all at the same time. And now I've just told you that you also need to audit your culture, change your behavior, and implement new practices.
I know that can feel like a lot.
But here's what I also know: the leaders I've watched do this work, the ones who lean into the culture questions with honesty and courage, consistently describe it as the thing that changed how their organizations operate. Not a program they launched. Not a grant they won. Not a strategic plan they wrote. The culture work. The investment in the conditions that allow people to show up fully.
That investment pays back in ways that are hard to put in a report but impossible to miss: teams that trust each other, staff who stay, and organizations that fulfill their missions not despite their people, but because of them.
That's what we're working toward. And you don't have to get there all at once.
Spring forward: one practice, one conversation, one honest question at a time.
