Want to understand your culture? Watch how work gets done.
Culture is an organisation’s human operating system. To understand it, examine the everyday practices through which strategy becomes action—and the employee experience those practices create.
In a recently re-released conversation on The High Performance Podcast, former All Blacks coach Sir Steve Hansen describes culture as an overused word.
I agree. Ask 100 chief people officers to define it and see how much agreement you get.
Some will describe values. Others will talk about belonging, behaviours, leadership or engagement. Each captures something important. Yet the range of answers creates a practical problem: if we mean different things by culture, what exactly are we trying to change?
My starting point is simple: culture is how strategy gets done.
You can see it in how people decide, collaborate, challenge, prioritise and respond when something goes wrong. Look closely at an ordinary working week. Your culture is already there.
What is organisational culture?
Organisational culture is the pattern of shared assumptions, expectations and everyday practices that shapes how people work together. It influences what feels normal, what earns approval and what happens when competing priorities collide.
I think of it as the organisation’s human operating system.
Strategy sets out the choices about where the business is going and how it intends to succeed. Culture shapes how people interpret and act on those choices.
The metaphor matters because an operating system affects everything running through it.
Culture influences whether information travels, whether decisions stick and whether people use their judgement or wait for permission.
Processes, structures and incentives help reinforce that system. They are not the whole culture: people interpret them, adapt them and sometimes work around them. Those unwritten workarounds can tell you as much as any policy.
Your culture is already making decisions
Imagine a business whose strategy depends on responding quickly to customers.
Its values celebrate ownership. Its leaders encourage initiative. Yet a routine customer remedy requires three approvals, and employees are criticised when they exercise discretion. Waiting becomes sensible. Escalating becomes safe. Customers experience delay.
The organisation has taught people how to behave. Another message about empowerment will struggle to change that lesson.
Similar contradictions appear everywhere. Collaboration is expected, but bonuses reward individual revenue growth. Learning is encouraged, but mistakes damage careers. Quality matters, until the month-end target is under pressure.
Employees experience the contradiction. Customers experience the consequences.
These patterns help explain why a strategy that appears clear in the boardroom can become difficult to deliver. People are responding to the expectations and consequences they encounter in practice.
Values become useful when choices get difficult
Values can guide action, but they need to help people choose.
In her Harvard Business Review article, Build a Corporate Culture That Works, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer argues that organisations should develop culture around the real dilemmas employees face. Broad positive statements offer limited guidance when credible priorities compete.
Consider a manager balancing speed and accuracy. Which decisions can the team make quickly and reverse later? Which require careful checking because an error would harm a customer?
“Be agile” does not settle that question. Neither does “pursue excellence”.
A useful cultural expectation explains the judgement required, the boundaries and when to seek help. People then need to see leaders honour that expectation when the pressure rises.
This is where culture becomes operational: it guides the decisions required to execute the strategy, including decisions nobody anticipated when the strategy was written.
Employee experience shows you the system in action
Employee experience is the everyday reality of working in an organisation. Gallup describes it through the interactions people have with their employer across the employment journey.
It includes whether people understand their priorities, have the tools to deliver, receive useful feedback and can get a decision when they need one.
This makes employee experience a valuable source of evidence about culture.
A colleague who must chase five people for basic information experiences the organisation’s approach to cooperation. A new starter given responsibility without support experiences its approach to development. Someone who reports a mistake and receives help experiences what learning means here.
Culture and employee experience are connected, but distinct. Culture helps shape the experience; that experience also reflects resources, technology, job design and individual circumstances.
An engagement score cannot explain all of this. It may indicate where to investigate. The next step is to understand what people repeatedly encounter and how it affects their ability to do good work.
Culture change requires changes to work
In To Change Company Culture, Focus on Systems—Not Communication, Benjamin Laker and colleagues argue that culture changes through shifts in systems, leadership actions and demonstrated norms.
The implication is practical. If you want different behaviour, examine what currently makes that behaviour difficult or costly.
For greater ownership, clarify decision authority and remove unnecessary approvals. For better collaboration, examine shared priorities, handovers and rewards. For learning, create time to review outcomes and make it safe to report emerging problems.
Communication helps people understand these changes. Credibility comes from experiencing them consistently.
Leadership is central. Every exception made for a high performer, every concern dismissed and every commitment honoured teaches people what matters. HR can support the work, but leaders across the business must take responsibility for the conditions they create.
There is no universal ideal culture to copy. The question is which practices support your strategy while enabling people to work responsibly and sustainably.
How to assess your culture through everyday work
Choose one strategic priority and follow it through a working week.
If the priority is customer retention, observe what happens when a customer raises a problem.
Who takes responsibility? Where does information stop? What can employees resolve themselves? Which targets influence their response?
Use five questions:
What does the strategy require people to do?
What do they actually do?
What makes that behaviour sensible here?
What do employees and customers experience as a result?
Which practice, incentive or leadership response should change first?
Look across teams and levels. The same organisation can create very different working experiences depending on the manager, function or location.
Then test a specific change. Track whether it improves the relevant outcome-decision time, rework, customer resolution or another meaningful measure and whether employees experience the intended difference.
At SaltX, our people and culture advisory work helps organisations understand these connections: how leadership, structures, systems and everyday practices enable or obstruct performance. We help identify what to change first and translate that insight into action.
Bring us a strategic priority that is proving harder to deliver than it should. Let’s look at how work actually gets done.
References
[1] The High Performance Podcast, [Steve Hansen: Building The Greatest Team In History](https://shows.acast.com/the-high-performance-podcast/episodes/steve-hansen-re-release), re-released 4 September 2026.
[2] Erin Meyer, [Build a Corporate Culture That Works](https://erinmeyer.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BuildaCorporateCulturethatWorks-HBR.pdf), Harvard Business Review, July–August 2024.
[3] Gallup, [Employee Experience: Strategies for Improvement](https://www.gallup.com/workplace/323573/employee-experience-and-workplace-culture.aspx).
[4] Benjamin Laker, Chidiebere Ogbonnaya, Yasin Rofcanin, Tomasz Gorny and Marcello Mariani, *To Change Company Culture, Focus on Systems—Not Communication*, Harvard Business Review, 25 August 2025.
