How to Transform Culture After Poor Engagement Scores
28 May 2025
Following our blog, ‘Transform Your Workplace Culture: A Practical Guide to Change,’ we’re focusing specifically on the steps to take to transform culture after receiving poor employee engagement scores. There is no one-size-fits-all solution because there are different reasons for poor engagement. During this blog, we’ll explore the types of questions asked during a Pulse survey and how a cultural transformation can address each issue and turn low engagement around.
In our blog, ‘Transform Your Workplace Culture: A Practical Guide to Change’, we explore all elements of workplace culture - what it is, why it matters, and how to get it right. It’s your North Star for understanding your organisational culture.
For this blog, we’re applying those learnings to a specific situation many businesses find themselves in: being on the receiving end of poor engagement scores.
What is Poor Engagement?
We’ll set the scene... You’ve run a Pulse survey to understand employee sentiment, and your overall score is 29% or below - a low score. For comparison, a neutral score ranges from 30% to 69%, and a high score ranges from 70% to 100%.
The fact that we refer to the middle ground as neutral suggests that anything below that is negative… and it is.
You should consider anyone in the 0 - 29% category as a detractor. There are detractors in every business, but too many can present a serious problem.
How Does Low Engagement Impact Your Business?
We explore this area in more depth in our blog, ‘Re-Engaging the Disengaged Employee’, but we’ll share the highlights here.
Organisations with low engagement will experience higher levels of absenteeism, lower productivity, a lack of innovation, increased turnover, and poor employee wellbeing.
Low engagement costs your business money, so it’s worth investing in making improvements.
What Causes Poor Employee Engagement?
Another topic covered in depth in our blog on disengaged employees is the identification of some common causes of poor employee engagement.
For this blog, we need to go deeper. We’re addressing a scenario where you’ve run a Pulse survey to gauge employee engagement and sentiment, so you’ll have the data you need to identify the cause.
Pulse surveys cover several topics, including:
- Job satisfaction
- Work-life balance
- Whether employees would recommend others to work for the company
- The state of employee wellbeing
- How employees feel about their benefits and rewards.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it highlights a few key areas to address when it comes to the role of culture and the impact of transforming it on poor engagement.
If employees aren’t satisfied in their roles, if work interferes too much with their personal lives, if their overall wellbeing is at a low point, and if they don't use the perks you offer or feel valued through rewards, your engagement score will be low.
Why Pulse Surveys are Important
Pulse surveys are essential because they give you real-time feedback on how your employees feel. If you’ve been through changes, such as a rebrand or restructuring, it’s vital to put yourself in your employees’ shoes and understand their mindset.
The better you understand your employees, the more likely you are to retain them.
What is Cultural Transformation?
To be clear, a few employees with a poor engagement score doesn’t mean you need a complete cultural transformation. There may be a few areas that require improvement, and we’ll reiterate that some employees will always fall at the lower end.
If your scores indicate a more significant issue, that’s when you need to think on a larger scale.
Cultural transformations don’t happen overnight. They’re intentional, strategic, and must align with business objectives alongside employee needs. More importantly, your approach must be authentic. Don’t think of transformation as putting a plaster over an issue because it's not enough. The change needs to come from the top and feed all the way through the business to every employee.
How to Make a Cultural Transformation
Organisational culture transformation requires strategic thought, especially when identifying what and whom to focus on.
There will be detractors in your business. Some are unengaged - meaning they’ve never been engaged and are unlikely to see your business as anything more than a way to earn money. Others may be disengaged, which means that at one point, they were engaged. Something happened to change their perspective, and your Pulse survey may help you discover what that was.
You can reengage disengaged employees, which may be the easiest area to tackle first. Your efforts with them may also filter down to the detractors, but this group will take more thought.
We’ve highlighted some reasons for poor engagement based on the topics covered during a Pulse survey. Next, we’ll delve deeper into each area to reveal how you can address them and transform your culture, enhancing employee engagement.
Job Satisfaction
A Pulse survey will ask about job satisfaction because it’s fundamental to engagement. Engage for Success published its UK Employee Engagement Survey 2025, revealing that employees whose jobs required them to work hard reported 27% higher engagement.
This figure suggests that people want to feel both challenged and fulfilled. Given what we know about Maslow’s motivational theories, the role of self-fulfilment and the work we’re doing, this figure isn’t a surprise.
The Engagement Survey also suggests that employees with autonomy over how they organise their daily work have 24% higher engagement - a direct nod to Pink’s motivational theories.
How can you use these insights to transform your culture and improve engagement?
- Ensure you foster a culture of learning, keeping employees challenged and allowing them to acquire new skills.
- Present new opportunities, the chances to lead a project, present a business case, run a learning session - show them that there’s room for growth.
- When you give your employees autonomy over how they complete their tasks, you’re communicating trust.
- Micromanaging causes employees stress and communicates the opposite of the point above - you don’t trust them. Let’s avoid this time-consuming habit.
Work-life Balance
A good work-life balance and flexibility have become increasingly important in recent years, and they are now considered essential for employees. Helping employees create separation between work and life, respecting their personal time, reduces stress and increases wellbeing and satisfaction.
It’s one of the top ‘people issues’ of the current climate, and when managers and leadership prioritise them, employees report being 14% more engaged than the national average (UK Employee Engagement Survey).
How can employers transform their culture to one that champions a healthy work-life balance?
We tackle this subject in our blog, ‘Is an Annual Leave Purchase Scheme the Key to Balancing Budgets and Life?’, and we’ll break down the main points here:
- When employers support hybrid working, employees report 12% higher engagement (UK Employee Engagement Survey). Hybrid working eliminates the commute, allowing employees to reclaim time for handling life admin, caring for their dependents, or spending time taking care of themselves.
- Allowing your employees to purchase extra days off through an Annual Leave Purchase Scheme gives them more time to enjoy what matters most. The more refreshed and energised your employees are, the more engaged they’ll be at work.
- Change mindset. Older employees may have to deal with the baggage left over from previous experiences - managers who think a lunch break should be shunned, who scoff at those who finish their day on time. Empower employees to set boundaries and educate managers on the importance of respecting their teams’ personal time.
- Don’t neglect the work-fun balance. Create a sense of belonging and camaraderie by organising regular team away days and social activities.
Employee Wellbeing
Job satisfaction and work-life balance are linked to the state of employee wellbeing, but there’s more to the subject.
Excess workplace stress can lead to burnout, and mental ill health causes the majority of long-term sickness absence. The UK Engagement Survey found that employees with unmanageable job stress are 34% more likely to practise presenteeism (working while unwell), which exacerbates poor wellbeing and negatively impacts productivity.
Our Money Mastery research revealed that 53% of people believe their employer has a duty of care over employee wellbeing.
How do you bring employee wellbeing into the heart of your culture?
We have two blogs that will help you answer this question:
Here are the four steps you can easily implement:
- Take work-life balance seriously by incorporating the points listed above into your working practices to bring authenticity to your wellbeing strategy.
- Get involved in awareness events. World Wellbeing Week is a great place to start, and the campaign provides ideas and resources to help you improve employee wellbeing.
- Create a wellbeing committee - a team of colleagues who run regular events and workshops focusing on wellbeing activities.
- Train Mental Health First Aiders who can offer peer-to-peer support for employees when they need someone to speak with about their mental wellbeing.
Benefits and Rewards
37% of the respondents in our Money Mastery research said that if they were considering moving to a different company, they would stay put if their employer offered better benefits and incentives.
If your Pulse survey shows dissatisfaction with benefits and rewards as the cause for poor engagement, you’re at risk of high turnover.
We also found that 66% would leave their role if they didn’t feel appreciated by their employer.
Poor engagement is costly, but when you add low employee retention to the mix, you’re risking the long-term sustainability of your business. Here’s how you can turn things around:
- Provide employee benefits that enhance financial, mental, and physical wellbeing, like Employee Discounts, an Employee Assistance Programme, and Gym Discounts.
- Embed a peer-to-peer recognition strategy because nothing boosts camaraderie and engagement more than encouraging colleagues to celebrate each other.
- Follow-up recognition with meaningful rewards. They don’t have to be financial. Allow employees to swap points for time and vouchers for experiences.
- Focus on delivering an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) that delivers value to your employees - benefits that actually benefit and rewards they actually want.
Employee Advocacy
Recruitment is an expensive business, and when potential candidates are considering working for you, they will explore what current and past employees have to say about your business.
If you can create an employee experience that makes work a place to belong rather than just a means to pay the bills, you can utilise your employees’ networks and connections, using word of mouth to fill roles.
How do you get to this point?
- Focus on job satisfaction.
- Prioritise work-life balance.
- Enhance employee wellbeing.
- Provide the benefits and rewards that deliver real value.
Turn Poor Employee Engagement Scores Around with Pluxee UK Ltd
Now you know what steps to take to turn poor employee engagement scores into an opportunity to transform your organisational culture and make great things happen.
From the benefits that matter and the perks that work to the resources you need to boost engagement, Pluxee UK is the smart partner in your corner.
Sources: UK Employee Engagement Survey 2025
