By Trudie Keys, Executive Associate at Change Logic

Organisations talk about culture constantly, yet it can still be hard to pin down. We measure it through employee surveys, engagement scores and experience data. We compare teams, track whether scores are moving up or down and look at external benchmarks to understand how we compare with other organisations.

I have learned not to treat culture scores as hard evidence but as indicators. For example, a strong average can look reassuring until you see low participation, or one part of the organisation having a very different experience from another. Sometimes the people who are not responding tell you as much as those who are. Sometimes silence tells you something too, because it makes you ask whether people believe speaking up will make any difference.

The value is in what those scores tell you about the culture you have today, and whether that culture will support where the business is trying to go.

For me, business strategy has to lead the way. Strategy sets the direction, then culture follows, then process and finally structure. If your strategy says the customer should sit at the centre of the organisation, the culture must support that. If the business needs to become faster, more innovative or more collaborative, you need a culture that makes those things possible. You cannot start with the structure and work backwards.

Benchmarking also needs careful handling because an organisation can learn a great deal by comparing the experiences of different teams and divisions internally, particularly when those comparisons reveal that people in the same business experience its culture very differently. But sooner or later the conversation has to move beyond internal comparison and ask a more important question: what does good look like for this organisation?

External benchmarks can help answer that across areas such as leadership, collaboration and customer focus. But the purpose is not to copy another organisation. Two companies in the same sector can have very different strategies. The benchmark gives you context, but your strategy still determines the culture you need.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is expecting people to behave differently while leaving everything around them exactly the same. Leaders may ask employees to make decisions faster, collaborate more or take greater ownership, while the approval structures, policies, processes and systems still push them back into the old ways of working. 

At that point, it is no longer just a people issue. If you want the culture to change, ask whether the organisation itself helps people work differently or makes it harder.

You also see culture in the small things people do every day. It comes through in how meetings are run, how managers react when someone disagrees with them, who gets brought into decisions and what happens when something goes wrong. Those moments tell you more about the culture than a set of values on the wall, because they show what people are expected to do.

Changing the culture doesn’t mean getting rid of everything that came before it. I have worked with organisations that grew up with a very family-oriented culture and then reached a point where they needed more structure, clearer roles and more consistent ways of working. The mistake is thinking that becoming more professional means losing the trust and sense of belonging that people valued in the first place. It does not have to.

We have experienced some of that at Change Logic ourselves. The business started in a garage, and as we have grown, we have naturally had to put more structure and clearer processes in place. We could not keep working in exactly the same way we did when we were much smaller, but we also did not want growth to make us feel like a completely different company. 

Culture cannot sit with HR alone. Leadership owns the strategy and the business results, so they also have to take responsibility for the culture that will deliver those results. HR plays an important role in bringing the work together, keeping things moving and helping the organisation make the changes, but it cannot do that on behalf of the leadership team.

You also need to look beyond the next employee survey to see whether anything is really changing. Are decisions being made faster? Are people clearer about who is accountable for what? Are teams working together better? Are people more willing to speak up, try something new or challenge the way things have always been done?

Over time, customers should feel some of that difference too, whether it shows up in better service, more consistency or a quicker response.

None of this happens quickly, and one of the biggest risks is changing direction too soon because the results are not immediate. If the strategy is clear and you know what kind of culture the business needs, give the change time to take hold. Otherwise, people wait for the next initiative to come along.

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