How to improve workplace culture: from stated values to daily behavior

To improve workplace culture, change the behaviors that people experience every day. Find out what employees experience now, name three or four specific behaviors you want, model them yourself, stop tolerating behavior that contradicts them, align recognition, hiring and promotion with them, and measure the change every quarter. Regular pulses from employee engagement software show team by team whether the change is reaching people.

Most organizations have work to do. Gallup analytics show that just 27% of employees strongly agree they believe in their company's values, and 23% strongly agree they can apply those values to their work every day. The gap between the values on the wall and daily work is where culture is decided.

Culture feels vague, but research on what employees actually say narrows it down. MIT Sloan Management Review researchers analyzing employee reviews found five attributes with by far the largest negative impact on culture ratings: disrespectful, noninclusive, unethical, cutthroat and abusive. Of all single topics, feeling disrespected at work had the largest negative impact on how people rated their culture. Inclusion weighed heavily too: seven of the 20 strongest predictors of a negative culture rating concerned whether diverse employees were represented, treated fairly, welcomed and included in key decisions.

The stakes go beyond mood. In the same research program, a toxic culture was 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company's attrition rate relative to its industry. Pay raises do not offset a culture people experience as disrespectful. Nor is it rare: on average, 10% of American employees in large companies mentioned at least one element of a toxic culture in their Glassdoor reviews between 2016 and 2020. The cost is also physical. When employees experience injustice at work, their odds of a major disease such as coronary disease, asthma, diabetes or arthritis rise by 35% to 55%.

This gives a clear order of priorities. Before ping-pong tables, offsites or new values, make sure people are treated with respect, decisions are fair, everyone is included in the work that matters, and unethical or abusive behavior has consequences.

Many culture programs start by rewriting the values. The evidence suggests this is the least important part. In a study of corporate culture, Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales found that proclaimed values appear irrelevant to firm performance, but that performance is stronger when employees perceive top managers as trustworthy and ethical. What counts is whether leaders' behavior matches what they say; integrity in leadership covers how that consistency is built and seen.

Managers are the link between values and daily work, and the link is often missing. Only two in 10 employees strongly agree that their manager explains how the organization's values influence their work, and the same share strongly agree that their coworkers are committed to those values.

Turn each value into behaviors anyone could observe:

If a value cannot be turned into behaviors, it is not guiding anything. Keep three or four, and drop the rest.

Culture changes when behavior and systems change together. The five steps in the figure below work at company level and, just as well, inside one team.

1. Diagnose. Ask people what the culture is like today, anonymously and in small listening sessions. Useful questions: "What behavior gets rewarded here that shouldn't?" "What would you change first?" "When did you last feel respected, or not, at work?" Look for patterns by team, not isolated comments.
2. Name the behaviors. Pick three or four behaviors that would make the biggest difference, based on what you heard. Write them as actions, as in the table above.
3. Model and correct. Leaders show the behaviors first and visibly. Then deal with what contradicts them, starting with the most senior or highest-performing people, because that is where the team looks to see if the change is real.
4. Align the systems. Change what you recognize, whom you hire and promote, and how decisions are made so they reward the behaviors (see below).
5. Measure. Track a few survey items and behavioral signals every quarter, share the results and what you did about them, and adjust.

A shared picture of where the team is going makes the behaviors easier to agree on; leadership vision shows how to build one with the team.

People learn the real culture from what happens after a bad behavior. If a high performer belittles colleagues and is still promoted, the team learns that results excuse disrespect, whatever the values say. One unaddressed case undoes many speeches.

Address behavior early and consistently:

• Name the behavior, privately and specifically. "In yesterday's meeting you interrupted a colleague several times and dismissed the proposal before it was finished."
• Connect it to the standard. "We've agreed that disagreement is about ideas, not people. That wasn't."
• State what you expect next time, and follow up. If it continues, use your organization's performance process.
• Apply the same rule at every level. Exceptions for stars or senior people are the fastest way to make a culture cynical.

Give people safe ways to raise problems that do not depend on the person causing them, and act visibly on what is reported. If the problem sits with a leader, the response has to come from the level above that leader, and people need to see that it did.

Behaviors last when the organization's systems reward them. Check five systems against the behaviors you named:

Career paths are a system too. In the same research program, lateral career opportunities were 2.5 times more powerful than compensation in predicting how well a company retained people compared with its industry peers. Letting people move sideways into new work tells them the organization invests in them.

Small, visible changes in these systems teach the culture faster than any campaign.

Most managers cannot rewrite company values, and do not need to. Team culture is shaped mainly by the manager's own behavior and the team's routines. Within a quarter, a manager can:

• Agree three behaviors with the team, in its own words.
• Start each team meeting with a minute of specific recognition linked to one of them.
• Hold a short, blameless review after each project; our guide on how to create a learning culture explains the format.
• Ask in every one-on-one: "Is there anything in how we work together that you'd change?"
• Address the first instance of disrespect immediately, privately and specifically.

Teams with a strong local culture often stay steady even when the wider organization is going through change, because people's daily experience is shaped by their own manager and colleagues.

Measure what people experience, not participation in culture activities:

• Survey items, every quarter. "I am treated with respect at work." "Decisions that affect me are explained." "I can raise a concern without fear of negative consequences." "My manager explains how our values apply to my work." Track the share who strongly agree, by team.
• A recommendation question. Employee Net Promoter Score asks how likely people are to recommend the organization as a place to work; follow it with "What is the main reason for your score?" and read the comments.
• Behavioral signals. Regretted attrition, internal transfers out of a team, sick days, the number of concerns raised and how quickly they are resolved.
• Exit and stay conversations. Ask leavers and long-tenured people the same question: "What would you change about how we work?"

Share results and the actions you took. Measuring without visible action lowers trust and response rates.

• Opening a listening session: "I want to hear what it's actually like to work here, including what doesn't match what we say. Nothing you say will be held against you, and I'll tell you what we do with it."
• Recognizing a behavior: "Thank you for flagging the delivery risk on Monday instead of Friday. That's exactly the kind of early warning we said we want."
• Correcting a behavior: "I need to talk to you about how the discussion went yesterday. Disagreeing is fine; dismissing people isn't how we work."
• Announcing a change: "You told us decisions often arrive without reasons. From now on, every team decision will come with the reasoning and who we consulted."
• Reporting back: "In the last survey, fewer of you felt able to raise concerns. Here are the two changes we made, and we'll ask again in three months."

• Starting with perks. Snacks and events can be pleasant, but they do not change how people are treated.
• Rewriting values instead of behaviors. New words on a wall change nothing if behavior stays the same.
• Exceptions for high performers. Tolerating disrespect from a star teaches everyone what the culture really is.
• Asking without acting. Surveys followed by silence make the next survey worse.
• Delegating culture to HR. HR can design the systems; managers and leaders create the daily experience.
• Expecting quick results. People believe a change after they see it repeated, usually over months.

Software makes culture measurable and visible. Engagement tools run regular pulses and show, team by team, whether people experience the behaviors leaders want. Recognition platforms let peers and managers thank each other for named behaviors, which shows what the organization actually rewards. Survey tools with anonymous comments surface disrespect or unfairness people will not raise in a meeting.

What no tool can do is change what a leader tolerates or how they treat people on a hard day. If trust has already been damaged, how to build trust in the workplace covers how to rebuild it before asking people to believe in a new culture.