Why engagement is not a survey: Rethinking culture, belonging and business impact

Culture and engagement are two of the most talked-about ideas in modern business.

They appear in strategy decks, leadership off-sites, and employee surveys, often presented as numbers that move slightly up or down each quarter. A percentage here, a benchmark there. Yet those numbers rarely tell the full story of what people inside a company are actually experiencing.

When we spoke with Lexie Newnham, Engagement and Culture Lead at IG Group, it became clear that she sees the work from a different angle. Engagement can’t be categorised by a survey or a score; it's reflected in how leaders behave, how decisions are made and how people feel about the work they are doing every day.

Her career has taken her through very different organisational environments, from fast-growing startups to global corporations operating across dozens of countries. Along the way, she has built engagement and inclusion strategies from scratch, navigated the evolving conversation around DE&I, and learned how to translate culture work into language that resonates with commercial leaders.

And perhaps most importantly, she has learned that if cultural work is done properly, it should eventually become invisible.

Lexie did not begin her career with a clear plan to work in culture or engagement.

After finishing university in 2011, she thought she might pursue a career in PR. Instead, she found herself entering the world of agency recruitment, working on high-volume hiring for call centres. It was intense work that demanded resilience and fast thinking.

“It definitely built some thick skin.” But the experience also revealed something important about the type of work she wanted to do. 

Agency recruitment often meant placing candidates into roles and then quickly moving on to the next brief. Lexie found herself wanting to understand what happened after that point. What made people stay in organisations? Why did some teams thrive while others struggled?

Those questions eventually led her to join digital marketing technology company MVF.

Over nearly nine years at the company, Lexie helped build the internal recruitment function, developed early careers programmes and worked closely with leadership on how the business attracted and developed talent.

A new Chief People Officer recognised that employee experience, engagement, employer brand and diversity work were all being treated as separate conversations. The organisation needed someone to bring those threads together and build a coherent strategy. Lexie was asked to take on the role.

That challenge, building something from the ground up, would become a recurring theme throughout her career.

Launching a culture or inclusion strategy inside a company can sound exciting. In reality, it often begins with uncertainty.

There are rarely templates to follow. The work requires navigating internal politics, competing priorities and scepticism from leaders who may not immediately see the value. Lexie approached the challenge by grounding the work in data and business outcomes. Rather than positioning culture initiatives as abstract ideals, she focused on measurable improvements and practical changes.

At MVF, that approach led to a number of tangible shifts. Engagement strategies became more structured, inclusion goals were introduced, and initiatives began linking directly to organisational outcomes such as retention and progression.

The impact: gender balance improved, attrition rates shifted, and engagement participation remained consistently high.

Yet Lexie is realistic about the nature of culture work inside organisations. Even strong programmes can fade if they are not embedded deeply enough in how the organisation operates.

The real measure of success is when certain policies or behaviours remain long after the person who introduced them has moved on. One example she still points to is the introduction of improved parental policies during her time at MVF, which remain in place years later.

Those kinds of changes signal that something meaningful has taken root.

After nearly a decade at MVF, Lexie made a significant move into a very different type of organisation. She joined SSP Group, a FTSE 250 food and beverage company operating more than 500 brands across 40+ countries. 

Instead of working inside a fast-moving technology company, she was now part of a global business employing tens of thousands of people in airports, train stations and travel hubs around the world.

The complexity of culture work increased overnight.

SSP had never had a dedicated DE&I leader before. There was no formal strategy in place, and inclusion efforts varied widely between regions. Lexie found herself building from scratch.

The result was the ‘Belong strategy’, a global framework designed to embed inclusion, well-being, and engagement across the organisation. It included initiatives such as:

These initiatives were tied to measurable outcomes, improvements in belonging scores and increases in female representation in leadership roles.

The work helped create shared language around culture across a highly complex organisation. When companies operate across dozens of countries, consistency matters. Lexie’s focus was on creating a clear global direction while allowing local teams the flexibility to adapt initiatives in ways that made sense for their cultural context.

That balance between structure and flexibility became a defining feature of the strategy.

Ask most organisations how they measure engagement, and the answer is usually immediate.

Surveys.

While Lexie acknowledges that surveys can be useful tools, she believes they are frequently misunderstood.

Once that happens, the goal becomes improving the score rather than improving the experience itself. Leaders begin asking how to increase participation rates or move the numbers slightly higher, rather than addressing the underlying behaviours driving those results. Engagement should be seen as a behavioural outcome rather than a metric.

That energy is shaped by leadership behaviour, team dynamics, communication and decision-making processes. A survey might highlight where problems exist, but it cannot solve them.

One of the biggest challenges culture leaders face is convincing senior leaders that engagement and inclusion work deserves investment. In the past, many DE&I arguments relied heavily on external research. Reports from consulting firms or academic studies showing the benefits of diverse organisations were often presented as evidence.

The problem, Lexie believes, is that external research rarely creates urgency inside a specific organisation.

Instead, culture leaders need to demonstrate how engagement and belonging affect outcomes inside their own business.

At SSP, in partnership with the People Analytics team, she began analysing engagement data alongside performance data. They looked for patterns between high-performing teams and leadership behaviours, identifying where strong engagement correlated with better results.

That internal evidence proved far more persuasive than external benchmarks.

When leaders can see how engagement affects their own teams and outcomes, the conversation shifts from theory to action.

Lexie has observed the growing overlap between internal culture and external employer brand. Historically, those two functions often operated separately. Employer brand focused on attracting talent, while engagement teams focused on internal employee experience. But the boundaries between them have blurred.

Employees now share their experiences publicly through social platforms and review sites. Candidates research companies extensively before joining, so internal culture inevitably shapes external reputation. This means the two conversations cannot remain separate.

If the story an organisation tells externally does not match the experience employees have internally, the gap will become visible very quickly. Lexie’s role at IG strongly reflects this, expanding into EVP creation, activation and embedding, ensuring alignment between how IG presents itself externally and the lived employee experience internally.

This reflects a wider shift in employer branding, where success depends on creating a proposition that is experienced by employees day-to-day and compelling to candidates. 

When we asked what people most underestimate about culture work, her answer came without hesitation. Time.

Real cultural change does not happen within a quarterly cycle or a single initiative. It requires sustained effort, leadership alignment and behavioural reinforcement over years. That is why Lexie focuses on building systems rather than launching standalone programmes.

If engagement, belonging and leadership expectations become part of how the organisation operates, the work continues even when strategies evolve or leadership teams change.

And ultimately, that’s the goal. Not a survey score or campaign, a workplace where the systems themselves create the culture people want to be part of.

Lexie's approach is: ground the work in data, connect it to business outcomes, and build systems that outlast any single initiative.

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