When It Comes to True Employee Engagement, No Pain Equals No Gain To achieve a truly world-class company culture, you have to go through some difficult times.

The mainstream portrait of employee engagement is a utopian scene, where smiling employees work harmoniously and collaborate effectively as productivity skyrockets.

Related: 10 Examples of Companies With Fantastic Cultures

But the sobering truth is that creating true employee engagement within your company is a painful process that is often both messy and difficult. I have focused an inordinate amount of time on our company culture over the last two years. In that time I have listened intently, signed onto software programs to collect and analyze data on employee engagement and sent out hundreds of emails asking for anonymous feedback.

The process at times has been painful. But that pain has led to a better company culture for our nationwide mortgage company.

So, don't believe all the hype about company culture being all rainbows and sunshine. If you want a truly world-class company culture, you have to go through some difficult times and endure some pointed criticism. But those painful moments are the key to authentic employee engagement.

Here are three difficult, and sometimes painful, steps that every company should take to create true employee engagement within their culture.

1. Listen to the good, but listen intently to the bad.

Employee engagement is painless during the good times. Employees love you. Feedback is positive and affirming. Company culture is almost effortless.

But even great companies go through difficult periods. And fast-growing companies find that growth spurts come with growing pains. During these times, true, transparent communication and employee engagement can be painful. Those employees who were praising you suddenly begin criticizing you. If you have an honest and open employee engagement structure, feedback can be brutally honest and pointedly direct.

This is the most important time to listen. If you listen to praise but ignore criticism, you do not have true employee engagement. It takes a thick skin, but listening when you are being criticized will give your employee engagement program a depth and meaning that is lacking in more superficial engagement programs.

2. Peel back the layers with intriguing questions

Every manager knows that employees express themselves in different ways. Some need no prompting to share their opinions and ideas. Others need to be invited before they feel comfortable giving their feedback.

Asking questions is a great way to make sure employee engagement includes all employees, even the quiet ones.

In employee surveys, I often ask short, but thought-provoking, questions like: If you owned the company what is the first thing you would change?

Asking questions is an important invitation for employees to express their feedback, but it also channels opinions around important topics. Unstructured feedback can be so broad and disorganized that it becomes useless. If you are trying to get employee feedback on the company's training program or management structure, the last thing you want is employees complaining about the dirty dishes in the company kitchen sink.

Structure feedback by sending out pointed questions that will generate thoughtful and useful feedback on specific programs or procedures. Then lob one or two open-ended questions out to staff, to allow them express what is on their mind independent of your direction.

Related: 5 Ways to Survey Employees About Company Culture

3. Pan for gold in engagement data.

Just about every company collects some level of data on employee engagement, even if it is only survey answers. But like many other forms of data, the information is often collected and then warehoused, never to be seen or used again.

Many executives are obsessive about analyzing and monitoring financial data, productivity levels, efficiency figures and other forms of data. But when it comes to employee engagement, they often ignore data altogether and launch programs based on personal opinions or gut feelings.

When employee engagement data is collected regularly, it reveals trends and can pinpoint problems within the company before they balloon into full-fledged crises. It can signal that a certain department of the company needs more resources, training or manpower.

I recently reviewed our internal employee net promoter scores, looking for month-over-month variations and trends. The data clearly showed some of our lowest scores coming in for our company's training program, something we had already been planning to expand and strengthen. The data, however, spurred immediate action to bolster our training for all employees.

We hired a senior vice president of training and set a company goal to conduct 2,000 hours of training for the quarter. The data, and early detection of a trend within that data, helped us make an immediate company decision as a direct result of regular employee engagement, and helped avert a long-term training problem.

Consistency is key here. When you collect data on a consistent basis, the data-analysis possibilities really open up.You can see morale dipping from month to month, or dissatisfaction with certain programs rising or leveling off. Make sure surveys contain some consistent questions month over month and year over year so that you have consistent data to analyze trends.

Data should be an important piece of employee engagement, but don't let it overwhelm your employee engagement program. Keep the human heart and personal connection of employee engagement, while still using the power of data to make it more efficient, effective and democratic.

Related: How to Have Amazon's High-Performance Culture Without the Backstabbing