According to Gartner, your highest-risk employees aren’t those who are job hunting right now; they’re the ones in your weekly 9am meeting.
They’re quietly doing just enough, hitting basic targets, but they’ve disengaged because they no longer resonate with your culture, or they feel let down by it.
These are the people who’ve decided to leave but just haven’t told you yet.
The research and advisory company coined a term for what’s happening with those employees. That term is culture dissonance.
It describes the gap between what your organization promises and what people actually experience day to day. In uncertain markets, Gartner suggests it widens fast because people who’d normally move on, don’t. They stay (because they need the money). And while staying, they’re making it harder for everyone around them to care.
Your instinct may be to communicate your way out of it. We don’t think you can.
At SongDivision, we’ve sat inside enough client teams to know that people don’t reconnect with a culture by understanding it better. They reconnect when they feel something real again – a moment of shared, honest energy. A collective experience that reminds them, and the people around them, why they’re actually there.
We’ve watched it happen with leadership teams who walked into a session guarded and skeptical, and left having created something together they’re still talking about months later.
The organizations getting this right aren’t waiting for any signs of dissonance to resolve themselves. They’re making deliberate choices about how their people experience the company culture, not just hear about it.
What the data shows
As Gallup explains in ‘What Is Employee Engagement, and How Do You Improve It?’ engaged employees are more likely to go beyond what’s expected of them. They deliver better customer outcomes and stay with the company for longer. They also achieve 23% higher profitability.
That translates into reduced talent acquisition costs, lower risk of future cultural dissonance, a pipeline of potential new recruits, plus a demonstrably stronger employer brand.
A question worth sitting with
When did you last create a moment, deliberately, not accidentally, when your team remembered why they were there?
