What We’ve Learned About Culture (and What We Haven’t)

By Amrit Sandhar, CEO/Founder, &Evolve

Ten years ago, talking about culture felt like swimming against the tide. You would get the same question, over and over, “What’s the business case for employee engagement?” Usually followed by, “That’s correlation, not causation”. You could sense the doubt. Despite the work done by Engage for Success and a handful of case studies that pointed to the benefits, the appetite for change was lukewarm. If survey results weren’t screaming “there’s a problem”, most organisations carried on as they were.

At the time, data around people and culture was basic at best. We didn’t know how many people were leaving after a few months. We weren’t analysing why people left, or what their experiences were really like. And with so little visibility into the employee experience, there was no urgency to change it.

Despite the concerns around employee engagement, many organisations seemed to latch on to the idea that having a strong mission, purpose and values, would create a good culture, and pursued this approach. They pulled senior leadership teams together for away days to define the company mission, values and vision, and then went on to plaster these all over the computer screens, doors, escalators, and mouse mats. Culture solved. Except it wasn’t.

Where we are now

Fast forward to today, and yes, progress has been made. There’s more focus on people metrics. Organisations are tracking attrition, running better exit interviews, and using lifecycle data to spot patterns. Some are even creating employee personas to help understand experiences over time.

We’ve moved on from constantly justifying the value of engagement – and thank goodness for that. But some of the habits remain. Surveys are still benchmarked against completely different companies, in completely different contexts. Managers still aren’t equipped to act on the data. And those values plastered on every screen? Are still not consistently lived.

So we’re still trying to fix culture with the same tools we’ve always used. Surveys, engagement reports, a few recognition schemes, rather than asking whether those tools are still fit for purpose.

Where we’re heading

The good news? Some organisations are now asking better questions. They are interrogating the purpose of their surveys. “Are we measuring what matters to our people? Are we designing our culture with intention, or just measuring it and hoping for the best? “ They are recognising that values aren’t the destination, but the compass, and unless those values show-up in how leaders behave and how decisions are made, they’re meaningless.

However, the more forward-thinking organisations are going further. They’re using science to understand things like identity (how strongly people feel connected to their organisation), and values alignment (how much people’s personal values align to each other, and the company’s). They’re moving beyond engagement scores and looking at cohesion, inclusion, and belonging. They are facing into the harder, more meaningful work of understanding how culture feels across locations, life stages, and working patterns. Not just how people respond to a survey, but how they experience their day-to-day reality.

The decade ahead

The next ten years need to be different. The organisations that will thrive aren’t necessarily the ones that benchmark well. They’re the ones who stop asking, “What’s everyone else doing?” and start asking, “What do we need to become?”. They’re the ones who stop skimming over problems with perks and posters and start digging into what their culture actually demands of people, and whether that’s sustainable, fair, and aligned with who they say they are. It’s not about being perfect, but it is about being honest.

We can’t keep doing what feels right. We need to start doing what is right. And that starts with creating cultures where compassion and performance far from opposing each other, come together to create workplace cultures where people and organisations thrive.