Workplace Culture: How to Understand and Change It
Workplace culture is what people repeatedly experience when they work in your business. It shows up in who gets listened to, how managers behave under pressure, what happens when somebody makes a mistake, how decisions are made, and whether the policies on paper match what happens in real life. If you want to change company culture, those everyday conditions are a better place to start than a new set of values.
That distinction matters because culture is easy to talk about and surprisingly hard to pin down. The CIPD's October 2025 factsheet describes organisational culture as influential but difficult to define and measure, and argues that organisational climate gives employers something more practical to work with. Climate is the meaning and behaviour employees attach to the policies, practices and procedures they actually experience. In other words, what does work feel like here, and what is teaching people how to behave?
We have spent years working with founder-led and growing businesses where the stated culture is positive and the lived experience is more complicated. Usually there is no single dramatic failure. A handful of small things have drifted: managers apply rules differently, decisions take longer, new starters learn more from observation than onboarding, or people stop raising problems because they are not sure what will happen next. That is often where culture change really begins.
One note before we start. This is correct as at 31 August 2026 and reflects our own practical experience alongside published CIPD and case study material. Culture work is judgement-heavy and specific to each business, so treat the frameworks below as a starting point rather than a fixed formula.
What is workplace culture, really?
Workplace culture, company culture and organisational culture are often used as if they mean exactly the same thing. For most leaders, that is fine. They all describe the shared assumptions and patterns that shape how people behave at work. The problem starts when culture becomes so broad that nobody can say what needs to change.
A business can say it values trust, for example, but an employee will judge trust through specific experiences. Can they make a decision without three approvals? Does their manager assume good intent when something goes wrong? Are flexible-working requests treated consistently? Does senior leadership share information before rumours fill the gap? Those experiences create the work culture far more powerfully than the wording on a values page.
The CIPD makes a useful distinction here. Its organisational climate and culture factsheet says culture can be unclear and difficult to measure, while organisational climate focuses attention on the meaning and behaviour connected to policies, practices and procedures. That moves the conversation from ‘what is our culture?’ to questions that a leadership team can actually answer. What behaviours are we rewarding? What do our systems encourage? Where are employees getting mixed messages?
Culture and climate are connected, but climate is easier to act on
We think of organisational culture as the wider pattern and organisational climate as the evidence you can see and hear now. If culture is ‘how things are done around here’, climate is the set of signals people are using to work that out.
That is why a company can have sensible policies and still have an unhealthy climate. A grievance policy may be perfectly written, but if people believe raising a concern will damage their career, the lived message is stronger than the document. Equally, a company may have very few formal rules but a strong climate because managers are consistent, senior leaders explain decisions properly, and people know what standards apply.
Here is a useful test. If a new employee ignored your values page and simply watched how decisions, disagreements, promotions and mistakes were handled for three months, what would they conclude your culture actually rewards?
Where does company culture show up day to day?
Culture becomes much easier to assess when you stop looking for one big answer. We tend to look at a series of ordinary moments because those are where employees learn the real rules of the business.
How decisions are made
A business that says it values ownership but requires senior approval for small decisions is teaching caution. A business that gives people clear boundaries and supports sensible judgement is teaching responsibility.
What managers do under pressure
Managers are where company culture becomes personal. If one manager gives clear feedback and another avoids every difficult conversation, employees experience two different organisations. This is one reason manager capability matters so much during growth.
Who gets rewarded and promoted
People notice whose careers move fastest. If collaboration is a stated value but individual heroics are consistently rewarded, the reward system is telling the truth about what matters.
What happens when somebody gets something wrong
A culture that says learning matters has to leave room for intelligent mistakes. If every error triggers blame, people learn to hide problems. If nothing is ever challenged, standards fall. The healthier position is usually clear accountability without humiliation.
How information travels
When leaders explain the thinking behind decisions, people have context. When information is delayed or inconsistent, employees fill in the blanks themselves. That often changes the climate faster than leaders realise.
Whether policies are applied consistently
Policies shape climate when managers use them. Inconsistent treatment around hybrid working, absence, performance or progression quickly becomes a culture issue because employees compare experience, not policy wording.
Case study: Microsoft made culture visible through behaviour
Microsoft is a useful example because its culture work has been sustained over time rather than presented as a one-off campaign. The company describes growth mindset, customer obsession, diversity and inclusion, and ‘One Microsoft’ as core cultural attributes. Its current careers material connects growth mindset to curiosity, learning, experimentation and learning from mistakes, rather than leaving it as an abstract value.
Microsoft's Inside Track article, ‘Defining the future: How we’re building an AI-powered continuous improvement culture at Microsoft’ (25 September 2025), says the ‘learn-it-all’ mentality Satya Nadella introduced when he became CEO in 2014 became a crucial foundation for the company’s later AI-enabled continuous-improvement work. That is the important part. A cultural idea became useful because systems and expectations kept reinforcing it.
There is another lesson in Microsoft's 15 November 2022 Official Microsoft Blog post, ‘Building a more inclusive workplace: Microsoft releases action plan following independent review’. The post responded to an independent review by law firm ArentFox Schiff LLP of Microsoft's sexual harassment and gender discrimination policies and practices, commissioned by Microsoft's Board after a 2021 shareholder proposal. Microsoft publicly acknowledged that a gap can exist between an organisation's stated culture and employees' lived experience, and set out an implementation plan responding to the review's recommendations. Culture is not proven by what leaders say the business is. It is tested by what employees experience and what the organisation does when evidence challenges its own story.
How can you measure organisational culture without guessing?
You cannot measure organisational culture with one score, and we would be cautious of anyone claiming you can. You can, however, build a clear picture by combining different sources of evidence. The aim is not to label the culture as good or bad. It is to understand where the experience supports the business you are trying to build and where it gets in the way.
Start with the questions that matter commercially. Are good people leaving particular teams? Are managers spending too much time resolving avoidable conflict? Is decision-making slowing as headcount grows? Are employees clear on priorities? Do people believe progression is fair? Culture becomes useful when it is connected to those business questions.
• Engagement survey. Shows patterns in trust, management, clarity, workload, inclusion and confidence in leadership. Look at differences between teams and themes, not only the headline score.
• Focus groups and interviews. Surface the language employees use to describe what work feels like. Ask for examples general statements are harder to act on.
• Employee lifecycle data. Turnover, absence, progression, probation outcomes, recruitment acceptance and exit themes. Segment where possible, because a company average can hide a local problem.
• Manager practice. How feedback, performance, flexibility, conflict and development are actually handled. Compare policy with actual manager behaviour.
• Business routines. Meetings, approvals, information flow, decision rights and planning. Notice what the operating model is teaching people to do.
• Employee relations data. Recurring grievances, disputes, complaints or informal friction. Look for patterns in process, management and trust, not individual blame.
We use engagement surveys as one part of this picture. On our own careers page, for example, we publish that JourneyHR's annual engagement scores have sat between 82 and 88 per cent over the last three years, with 100 per cent participation. The score is useful, but the real value is in the discussion underneath it: where people feel supported, where friction is building, and what needs to change before the next survey.
If you only ask ‘are people engaged?’, you can miss the operating conditions creating the answer. A better culture review joins sentiment to what is happening in teams, processes and leadership behaviour.
When should a business consider culture change?
Culture change is often discussed as if something has gone badly wrong. Sometimes it has. More often, the business has changed and the way people work has not caught up.
We see this particularly in founder-led businesses. At twenty people, a founder can set context in a conversation and notice tension early. At eighty people, that same informal model becomes unreliable. Managers become the main interpreters of the business, more decisions happen without the founder in the room, and employees need clearer systems. The culture may still be full of good intent, but good intent no longer travels far enough on its own.
Common signals worth watching for:
• Headcount has grown faster than management capability.
• A restructure, merger, acquisition or leadership change has altered how teams work.
• Values sound right but employees struggle to describe what they mean in practice.
• Different teams have developed very different standards and ways of working.
• Engagement data shows recurring concerns around trust, workload, inclusion or leadership.
• Good people are leaving for reasons that do not show up in pay benchmarking.
• Decisions that used to be quick now need repeated escalation.
• Leaders want different behaviour but systems still reward the old behaviour.
Case study: the7stars protected alignment as it grew
JourneyHR has worked for many years with the7stars, described in our case study as the UK's largest independent media agency. As the agency grew beyond 300 people, the challenge was not to invent a culture from scratch. It was to keep individual development, team identity and the wider business goals connected as scale made that harder.
In 2024, we facilitated Team Vision Setting Sessions across all 16 departments. The sessions explored personal values, communication preferences and team ambitions, then connected those conversations back to the agency's objectives. Teams created clearer development goals and commitments around how they would work together. You can read the full Team Vision Setting case study on the JourneyHR site.
The reported outcomes included stronger understanding of how individual work contributed to the agency's success, better collaboration and communication, clearer team identity, development objectives aligned with business goals, and greater ownership and accountability. What we like about this example is that the intervention was practical. It did not ask people to admire the culture. It helped teams translate it into decisions, goals and behaviour.
Case study: culture change during wider business change
Culture also becomes particularly visible when a business is changing. Little Lion Entertainment describes its work with JourneyHR as a close partnership with its leadership team and Board, helping decisions complement the organisation's culture during a period of cultural change. Its testimonial calls cultural change one of the most delicate and complex changes a business can go through and credits JourneyHR with helping manage that work successfully.
That is consistent with what we see elsewhere. When the structure, leadership or strategy changes, employees are watching how decisions are made, whose voices count and whether the organisation behaves consistently with what it has previously said. The change plan and the culture plan are usually the same piece of work, whether they are labelled that way or not.
What does effective culture change actually involve?
Culture change is rarely one initiative. It is a sequence of choices that make a different way of working easier, clearer and more consistent. We tend to come back to six areas.
1. Be specific about what needs to change
“Improve the culture” is too vague to run as a project. Name the business issue and the behaviour connected to it. You might need faster decisions, more consistent management, better cross-team collaboration, clearer accountability or more confidence speaking up. The sharper the problem, the easier it is to see progress.
2. Understand the current climate before designing the answer
Use surveys, interviews, data and observation to understand what employees experience now. Ask what supports the behaviour you want and what blocks it. Do not begin with a values workshop simply because values feel like culture work.
3. Get the leadership team aligned on behaviour, not slogans
Employees notice what leaders tolerate and what they prioritise. If the senior team has different views on performance, flexibility, communication or decision rights, that inconsistency will travel through managers. Leadership alignment has to get practical.
4. Give managers the capability to carry it
Managers turn broad intentions into daily experience. They need clear expectations, useful processes and the skill to have conversations properly. Training can help, but it works best when the business also removes conflicting rules and unclear responsibilities.
5. Change the systems that keep producing the old behaviour
Look at performance measures, reward, promotion, meeting structures, approvals, onboarding, recruitment, hybrid-working practices and information flow. If the system rewards the old culture, communication about a new culture will not win.
6. Review what employees experience after the change
Culture work should create observable differences. Revisit the data and ask whether people are seeing them. Do managers behave more consistently? Are decisions clearer? Are teams collaborating differently? Has the friction moved? Keep the parts that work and change the parts that do not.
Where does culture change tend to go wrong?
The most common problem is treating culture as a communications exercise. New values, a launch event and a set of posters can create attention, but they cannot compensate for inconsistent decisions afterwards.
Another common pattern is measuring culture and then failing to act. Asking employees for candid feedback raises an expectation that something will happen. You do not need to accept every suggestion, but you do need to explain what you heard, what you are changing and what you are not changing. Silence after a survey teaches people something too.
We also see organisations put too much responsibility on employees. A culture of collaboration cannot be created by telling teams to collaborate if targets, ownership and incentives push them in opposite directions. Psychological safety does not come from asking people to speak up if leaders respond badly when they do. Accountability cannot improve when roles are unclear.
And culture change struggles when senior people believe the new expectations apply mainly to everybody else. The behaviour with the highest visibility sets the standard. If leaders make exceptions for themselves, employees learn the real rule very quickly.
How JourneyHR can help
We work with founder-led and growing organisations on the practical parts of workplace culture: understanding what people are experiencing, deciding what needs to change, and building the structures and management habits that make the change stick.
That might start with an HR Health Check or an employee engagement survey. It may involve organisational values, leadership facilitation, organisational design, management development, team workshops or support through a wider change programme[AV1] . For some clients, we stay involved as their retained People + Culture team so that culture is considered alongside everyday people decisions rather than treated as a separate project.
The right starting point depends on the problem. If the leadership team is aligned but managers are applying standards differently, manager development may be the priority. If employees describe confusion about decisions and roles, organisational design may matter more. If you are about to restructure, culture needs to be considered inside the change plan from the beginning.
Get in touch: JourneyHR contact page or explore our HR Consultancy Solutions.
Final thought
Culture is rarely changed by talking about culture more. It changes when people experience different decisions, clearer expectations and more consistent behaviour often enough that the new way of working becomes normal.
If you are trying to understand your own work culture, start with what people experience rather than what the organisation says about itself. That usually tells you where the useful work is.
FAQs
What is the difference between workplace culture and organisational culture?
For most practical purposes, workplace culture and organisational culture describe the same broad idea: the shared patterns, expectations and assumptions that influence how people behave at work. The CIPD argues that organisational climate can be easier to change because it focuses on the policies, practices and procedures employees actually experience. That gives leaders something more concrete to assess.
How can a small business assess its company culture?
Start with evidence from more than one source. Use an engagement survey or short pulse survey, speak to employees in groups or interviews, review turnover and exit themes, and compare written policies with how managers actually apply them. Look for repeated patterns. In a small business, a few honest conversations can reveal a lot, but combine them with data so the loudest voice does not become the whole story.
How long does culture change take?
There is no reliable fixed timetable because culture change depends on what is changing and how deeply current behaviour is embedded. A manager-practice issue may improve within months if expectations, training and follow-through change together. A business-wide culture change after rapid growth, restructuring or a merger usually takes longer. We would judge progress by observable behaviour and employee experience rather than a launch date.
Can you change work culture without changing your company values?
Yes. Sometimes the values are perfectly sensible and the problem is that the operating environment contradicts them. A business may value trust but still have unnecessary approvals, or value development while managers have no time for regular feedback. In those situations, culture change is less about rewriting the values and more about changing systems, expectations and behaviour so the existing values are actually experienced.
What role do managers play in culture change?
Managers are one of the strongest influences on an employee's day-to-day experience of company culture. They interpret policies, set expectations, give feedback, respond to mistakes, approve flexibility and decide what gets escalated. That is why culture change often fails when leaders focus on communication but leave managers without clear standards, practical tools or the confidence to handle difficult conversations consistently.
