What’s workplace culture anyway?

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Workplace culture can make or break an employee’s experience of your organisation. When organisations get it right, their employees stay the course. But when they get it wrong, it can lead to headline news.

Widely reported stories around the negative culture at large organisations like Uber and the Metropolitan Police have focused attention on the concept of workplace culture.

Placing your values at the heart of your workplace is good for all stakeholders – and your bottom line. There’s no off-the-shelf pattern to creating a positive workplace culture. So, how do you make effective changes to your workplace culture? I’ll tell you!

Each organisation has their own unique workplace culture. Your culture is made up of the history, traditions, values, aims and behaviours of everyone in your workplace. It’s not a straightforward concept that’s simply written down and obeyed. It’s the multi-layered, living personality of your organisation. It needs to be clearly identified and continually nurtured by all its participants.


Workplace, or ‘organisational’, culture is often thought of as ‘the way we do things around here.’ It’s the reality of how people experience working in your organisation.
It’s also about psychological safety; it’s an environment where “employees feel that their voice matters in driving the business towards a common purpose.”


Culture is collaborative – meaning everyone is responsible for building a healthy, positive workplace culture. But since the pandemic, employees’ priorities have shifted. They now want to work for companies that do more than say they have a great culture – they have to be able to show it through their actions.


As outcomes and results have become the chief metrics, leaders pay less attention to how those outcomes are achieved. And if you don’t value or measure “how” something has been achieved, corruption and poor behaviour follow. If you’re never rewarded for upholding values, you quickly learn what matters, what has currency, what the “real” values are.”

Several elements influence your workplace culture, including:

  • Values and mission: What do you stand for as an organisation? What do you collectively believe in and how does this impact on how you do business?
  • Policies and processes: How do you treat all the stakeholders involved in your organisation? This is about putting those values into practice within your workplace culture. How do you measure performance, hire people and define promotion?
  • Leadership: Does your leadership team consistently model your organisation’s values to the rest of the team through their behaviours?
  • Employees’ attitudes and behaviour: How do your people treat each other? Is this in line with the workplace culture you want to create? 

Nothing influences your workplace culture more than the people within it.

If you’re working to bridge the gap between the culture leadership wants to see and how things actually are, everyone has to commit to their part. But what might this look like?

CEO and leadership team: Define measurable aims and the roadmaps that guide everyone towards your desired workplace culture.

HR: HR professionals use their expertise to bolster the desired culture in creative ways that lead to better people processes, systems, training and communication. 

Middle managers: Employees primarily experience role-modelling of the desired culture through the middle managers of any organisation. Their behaviours and reinforcement of culture-building processes are crucial.  

Employees: Employees need to give their honesty to the other members of the organisation. Real feedback about current workplace culture, the impact of any changes and their ideas for improvement are essential. Employees’ other main responsibility is to demonstrate behaviour and attitudes that are appropriate to the desired culture while at work.

There isn’t one accepted definition of a ‘good’ workplace culture, because different businesses all have their own identity and that’s as it should be.

Quinn and Cameron’s ‘competing values framework’ identifies four different types of workplace culture, defined by how the different values are prioritised.  

Within this typology, the four types of workplace culture are identified as:

  • Clan: Family-like, friendly atmosphere. High engagement based on loyalty and tradition. Success is openness to customer needs and care of their people.
  • Hierarchy: Formal structure and rules. Efficiency is essential. Success is about reliable, smooth delivery.
  • Adhocracy: Risk taking, entrepreneurial. Innovation and trendsetting are key. Success is pioneering new products or services.
  • Market: Competitive, focused on doing the work and achieving the goals. Winning is the aim. Success is measured in market share and market penetration.

None are inherently better they’re just better suited to different business structures. If you’re leading discussions about how to change workplace culture, using these frameworks can be a helpful guide to establish what you most value.

A positive workplace culture is important at an individual level, ensuring that everyone has everything they need to thrive. 

But it’s also about better business. It’s increasingly apparent that improving workplace culture is crucial to business success in a number of ways, including:

  • Increased employee engagement leads to increased productivity. 
  • Happy staff don’t leave. Don’t lose your talent to the competition. Increased retention means decreased spend on recruitment and training.
  • A positive culture attracts the best recruits to your business by having a well-known positive workplace culture.
  • Managers spend less time addressing employee issues and more time helping to move the business in the right direction.
  • A great culture can also protect your brand reputation by the absence of ammunition ex-staff can publicly fire.
  • Customer satisfaction increases when they interact with staff that project their positivity.

Improving workplace culture is essential for your overall growth strategy to build longevity and success. 

Workplace culture transformation doesn’t get ticked off a list. It evolves with the organisation and the people within it. The very nature of its constant change means that it’s really difficult to measure how long systemic change actually takes – and absolutely crucial that monitoring and nurturing it is prioritised in any business planning.

It falls to the different leaders to specify any particular changes they would like to see in their areas. These are things that can be measured, so improvement can be shown over time.

For example, employee engagement questionnaires reveal that many people are unhappy about the disrespectful attitude shown by a few members of the sales team. Middle managers have felt that they have to turn a blind eye to their ‘banter’ because of their high sales achievements. After expressing this to senior leaders and receiving some specific training, managers now feel empowered to call out all behaviour that doesn’t meet the desired culture. 

Some changes to an extremely toxic workplace culture can be eliminated very quickly. But the underlying culture that allowed that to exist may need time to embed real change.

Everyone’s workplace culture is unique to them, so your improvement plan won’t look like everyone else’s. But if you’re about to embark on a workplace culture transformation, there are some considerations that will apply to every workplace.

You need to know why you’re investing time and resources in this change. Usually, organisations have discovered a gap between the ‘desired culture’ leadership thinks you have and the actual culture your employees are living. Before you go any further, you need to make sure that all the elements of your vision for your desired culture are clear.

Organisations need to ensure employees connect with the vision and need for change and understand its benefits, rather than feeling the negative effects of an upheaval.”

You can only lead from your perspective, but you need to understand where everyone else is coming from if you want to successfully take them with you on this transformation. Effective and active listening is the only way to really understand. And it’s often more challenging than people expect.

Leadership needs to dive into the current cultures in different departments and locations with the primary purpose of listening and learning. This means implementing feedback mechanisms like surveys, focus groups, suggestion boxes, company meetings, and manager one-to-ones to gather information. 

At this stage, outside HR consultants can really help an honest sharing of opinion. Talking to a third party can give individuals reassurance of anonymity when they’re in the vulnerable position of speaking truth to power.

As leaders, you need the honesty of your employees, in order to create and maintain a positive workplace culture for everyone. This means open, transparent lines of communication. You need to model this by being open with your workforce. If you want a workplace in which people feel bold enough to share their mistakes and concerns, you need to share yours. If you want to encourage employees to support each other – publicly share the positives you see in them. And make sure that everyone, at every level, has the information they need to do the best job possible at all times. 

Making changes to your workplace culture shouldn’t come with the bells and whistles of a product launch. Any type of change can be uncomfortable, challenging, and makes people feel vulnerable – especially when it involves their livelihood. It might be driven by excitement in the leadership team, but that doesn’t mean it will be met with the same emotion. Take your time to put support systems, like training, in place, make sure everyone understands why the changes are happening, and calmly take one step at a time.

The only way you can know how your culture is performing, is by keeping track of everything. This means recording key data and analysing it at regular intervals. There are several main metrics that help you see how your culture is developing, like: employee engagement surveys, attrition and staff turnover figures, and hiring data. This gives you information about how your current employees feel and how attractive your culture is to those considering joining your organisation.   

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