One-dimensional efforts to revive employee engagement overlook important dynamics of organizational culture. Here’s how to get the full picture and spark world-class performance from your teams.

An inarguable (and often inconvenient) fact is that a great member experience (MX) begins with a great employee experience (EX). Further, a great member experience goes hand-in-hand with revenue growth and profitability, as your satisfied members stay with you, do more business with you, and refer you to others.

As one brand consultant noted in Harvard Business Review: “To tap the power of EX to create compelling [M]X, business leaders must align the two.”

A thriving organizational culture is the foundation of exceptional member experiences. But when your employees aren’t engaged, your internal culture suffers. The impact is inevitably felt not only within the workplace but in the performance of those directly serving your members. When the back office is not supporting the employees on the front lines, service delivery falls short of member expectations. In other words, you can’t fool your members when things aren’t going smoothly behind the scenes!

When lack of engagement causes your EX to become disconnected from your MX, you’re not just putting your member relationships at risk. You’re losing the powerful impact this dynamic should be having on your bottom line. Fortunately, with the right strategy, tools, and the will to execute, you can catalyze a culture of resilient forces—engaged employees collaborating to provide world-class service to your members.

Credit unions CEOs: engagement a “must-have”

There is no better time to revive your culture, as it has been recognized by credit union executives as the top success factor for 2025. In a recent Filene/Velera study, CEOs and other executives from 90 of the nation’s top-performing credit unions were asked:
1. What factors are absolutely foundational to your success?
2. If you had to choose only one success factor as a “must-have,” what would it be?

Executives participating in the study identified “skilled and engaged employees” as the number one factor that is “absolutely foundational” to success in 2025. And if they had to choose only ONE success factor as a “must-have,” they would choose a “strong internal culture where everyone is aligned,” followed by “skilled and engaged employees.”

If having an engaged culture is the hinge on which business outcomes turn, then getting both employees and leadership aligned in their view of that culture is essential to success. But how do you accelerate employee engagement to repair this cultural disconnect? As with any issue: you define it, you measure it, you analyze it—so you can get the data-driven insight you need to ACT to fix it.

Many efforts to infuse new life into tired workplace cultures are doomed at the outset because they focus on only ONE dimension: the individual employee’s relationship to the organization. In terms of the formula above, they are defining the issue too narrowly. A healthy culture involves MANY employee relationships. So your strategy for a vibrant culture should take into account how well your teams are working with each other.

Thinking in two dimensions

While there may be different meanings of “employee engagement,” it is traditionally understood as the degree to which individual employees:

• Feel connected to their organization, whether they work onsite or remotely;
• Feel they are contributing to the organization’s success; and
• Have confidence in their leadership—from the top down.

This view of engagement is thus based on a vertical dynamic in that it reflects the relationship between the employee and the organizational hierarchy (managers, leaders, the company, etc.). Often overlooked is the horizontal aspect of employee engagement, the dynamic that fosters collaboration in pursuit of an organizational mission.

In assessing internal culture and resulting performance, this dimension takes into account how well employees work together—within teams and across teams. This is beyond individual motivation. It is about operational synergy—peer-to-peer interactions, cohesive teamwork, and seamless cross-functional cooperation.

Measuring vertically and horizontally

One of the metrics commonly used to measure engagement is the Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS. It is typically based on a single, straightforward question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company as a place to work to a friend or colleague?”

The eNPS offers a straightforward snapshot of overall employee sentiment, so you can track shifts over time, but the single score itself only scratches the surface of what you need to truly elevate and improve culture. It tells you WHAT or HOW employees feel but leaves a critical gap in understanding WHY they feel that way.

Without insight into the underlying drivers (the “why”) organizations risk missing the mark on developing meaningful engagement strategies. Identifying these engagement drivers—again, the “why” behind the score—is essential for uncovering the real context and specifics of the employee mindset and emotions so you can fix things that need to be fixed.

But eNPS only measures the vertical aspect of employee engagement. For an accurate picture of your organization—and an effective diagnosis of what might be wrong—you need to measure the horizontal aspect of employee engagement—again, what might more accurately be called “effective collaboration.”

Driving growth with engaged, collaborative teams

This horizontal, team-centric dimension is not just a nice-to-have, it’s actually the engine that powers high performance where employees and teams align, share insights, and cooperate to achieve common goals, such as delivering excellence in the member experience.

When internal service quality is strong—when teams proactively support, communicate, and collaborate—it fuels efficiency, reduces friction, empowers people to deliver their best work, and it directly impacts member satisfaction and business outcomes.

This IS aligning culture to the member and it’s at the very core of the organization’s operating structure. The goal is to build a high-functioning organization where teams operate seamlessly across functional boundaries, breaking down traditional siloes to create a cohesive, high-trust environment.

This approach enhances collaboration, not only retaining your top talent but also driving organizational synergy and effectiveness that extends to every area of operations, aligning each one toward the shared objectives of the organization.

Ultimately, it’s about creating a ripple effect that reaches the member and drives retained, repeated, and referred business. Ultimately, it makes your organization a resilient force in a competitive marketplace. It’s easy to say that your goal is a vibrant workplace culture with teams focused on your organizational mission.

But the Filene/Velera report mentioned above points out that strategies are not in short supply for credit union leaders. Rather, it is in the execution of those strategic visions where credit unions are falling short. And the longer you wait to act, the harder it is to restore your culture to health when things go awry.

Only when you really “get under the hood” of your internal culture can you see what’s keeping your employees from becoming more engaged and collaborative. With a proven process of first defining the issue, then measuring, analyzing, and acting on it, you gain the capability to boost engagement, sustain collaboration, strengthen alignment, and drive growth from within.

When you have intel that gives you a clear line of sight to both vertical and horizontal internal dynamics, you can act more precisely to build the resilient forces that deliver outcomes of exponential success.