Boards, investors and employees are increasingly scrutinising culture yet most organisations still can’t define it, measure it or evidence that it actually works.
Culture that counts: is your business ready to prove it?
Written by -
The end of an era
For years, culture was filed under “soft” - a nice-to-have that lived on the values poster by the lift, not in the numbers in the board pack. That era is over. Boards, regulators, investors and employees are now scrutinising how organisations define, measure and communicate culture, and many are discovering they can’t answer the basic questions being put to them.
That gap was the starting point for the latest Positive Change Group ChangeLAB event, which brought together senior leaders from organisations including ITV, Rightmove, Coats and SEGRO - spanning communications, HR, governance, sustainability and investor relations.
The consensus was blunt: culture only creates value when it’s clearly defined, authentic to the lived experience, consistently modelled by leaders and tied directly to strategy.
What the conversation covered
The conversation ranged across the questions organisations now find hardest: how to define culture in practical terms, how to close the gap between what’s communicated and reality, how to measure outcomes rather than just sentiment, how to embed accountability beyond a single function, and how to connect culture to performance, resilience and trust.
The headline thinking is captured below; the full detail, examples and recommendations are set out in our new whitepaper, ‘Culture That Counts’ - written to give boards a practical view of what credible culture actually takes.
Culture is now a performance driver
It’s a premise that still trips up plenty of organisations: culture isn’t separate from performance, it’s a driver of it. Whether a business is navigating a transformation, an acquisition, a leadership change or shifting workforce expectations, culture increasingly shapes engagement, decision-making, innovation, stakeholder trust and resilience.
As one participant put it: “Culture should be in service of your strategy - not just about making it a nice place to work.” It’s a useful reframe. The moment culture is treated as a wellbeing initiative rather than a business lever, it loses its claim on leadership time and investment.
Values are easy - behaviours are the hard part
If there’s a villain in this story, it’s the polished values statement that nobody lives by. Values alone are no longer enough - “values are pointless unless they are modelled by leadership,” as one attendee put it.
What matters is how culture actually shows up: in everyday decisions, management capability, team rituals and the processes people navigate to get work done. Organisations that spend more time wordsmithing their values than embedding behaviours are, in effect, optimising the wrong thing.
Closing the gap between communication and reality
Authenticity is the thread running through all of it. The most credible cultures are role-modelled by leaders and visible in everyday behaviour, not simply described in a report or a presentation.
Closing the say-do gap comes down to making leadership visible: sharing decisions shaped by values, demonstrating accountability through change, and closing the loop when employees raise concerns. Employee listening sessions with non-executive directors and board members are one practical way to shrink the perceived distance between the top and the rest of the business.
Moments of change - mergers, restructures, leadership transitions - are the real pressure test. Without clear cultural guardrails, businesses risk fragmentation and a loss of identity. But uniformity isn’t the goal: an overarching culture built on shared principles and clear boundaries around risk and reputation can still leave room for local cultures to breathe.
Measuring what actually matters
This is the thorniest question of all. Most organisations already track a range of cultural indicators - engagement, attrition, health and safety, DEI, whistleblowing, internal mobility - but metrics alone rarely tell the whole story. A degree of attrition can even be healthy for a business mid-transformation, opening the door to the right people for a key moment of change.
Employee engagement surveys don’t measure culture, they measure engagement. The fix isn’t more dashboards - it’s pairing the quantitative with the qualitative. That means assessing behaviours such as collaboration and psychological safety, reporting on outcomes like retention and leadership effectiveness, and using storytelling and real case studies to make culture tangible rather than abstract.
Culture as a resilience and risk lever
Increasingly, culture is viewed through a governance and resilience lens. A strong culture supports ethical decision-making, accountability and transparency - and, in turn, reduces reputational risk. It’s also most visible under pressure: strong cultures help organisations hold trust and performance through uncertainty, while weak or undefined ones breed the confusion and misalignment that quietly derail transformation.
The bar has moved
Culture has arrived on the board agenda. The problem is that most organisations have got there without the infrastructure to back it up - no clear definition, no meaningful metrics, no honest account of the gap between what’s stated and what’s lived. That’s what makes this a liability. Scrutiny without evidence is where reputations get made or lost.
Got any questions?
If you'd like to explore how culture can shape your stakeholder relationships, talk to our teams across the Positive Change Group.