# Building a Culture That Doesn't Suck

> Learn how to build a high-performance culture that people actually want to work in.

- **Author:** Robin Keyen
- **Category:** GZXEz9XgZyXtmslFhobE
- **Published:** 2026-04-01
- **Language:** en

## Let's Be Honest About What Culture Actually Is
Company culture is one of the most talked-about and least understood things in business. Everyone says they have a good one. Almost nobody can tell you what it actually is or how they know.
Here's a working definition that cuts through the noise: culture is what happens when nobody is watching. It's how people treat each other when the manager isn't in the room. It's whether your best people feel like they belong here, or whether they're quietly sending out their CVs. It's the gap — or the absence of a gap — between what your company says it values and what it actually does.
Culture isn't a set of values on a wall. It isn't a team lunch or a foosball table. It's the accumulated result of every decision, every conversation, and every behaviour your organisation tolerates or refuses to tolerate — every single day.
Get it right and it becomes a competitive advantage that's nearly impossible to copy. Get it wrong and you'll be spending years recovering from the talent and revenue it costs you.
## Why This Is a Business Problem, Not an HR Problem
The biggest mistake companies make about culture is treating it as a "soft" topic — something HR handles while the real business gets done. The data dismantles that assumption completely.
These are not motivation-poster numbers. These are the financial consequences of a problem that most organisations aren't treating with the seriousness it deserves.
 ⚠️ Warning: If engagement in your company is tracked once a year in a survey that nobody reads the results of, you are not measuring culture — you're performing the appearance of caring about it. The gap between those two things is exactly where culture quietly falls apart.
## What Toxic Culture Actually Looks Like
Most leaders would say their company doesn't have a toxic culture. Most of them are wrong — not because they're dishonest, but because toxic culture rarely announces itself. It accumulates quietly.
MIT Sloan's Culture 500 project — which analysed 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews across hundreds of companies — identified five markers that consistently predict cultural toxicity:
- Disrespect — people are talked over, dismissed, or publicly undermined

- Non-inclusion — certain groups are systematically left out, talked past, or held to different standards

- Unethical behaviour — rules apply differently depending on seniority or relationships

- Cutthroat dynamics — people hoard information, compete destructively, or undermine colleagues to get ahead

- Abusive management — managers who intimidate, belittle, or make examples of people


The consequence of these isn't just unhappiness. It's departure — and specifically, the departure of your best people first.
## The Values Trap: When Culture Is Just Wallpaper
Here is the most common version of bad culture — the one that exists in organisations that genuinely believe they have a good one.
The company has values. They're on the website, in the onboarding deck, probably on a wall somewhere. And most of the time, they have almost nothing to do with how the organisation actually operates.
This is called value washing, and it's one of the primary drivers of disengagement. Employees aren't naive. When a company says it values transparency and then makes major decisions without any explanation, people notice. When it says it values people but consistently rewards those who work unsustainable hours, people learn what the real values are — and they evaluate whether they want to live by them.
The fix is not better values. It's better alignment between words and actions — specifically at the leadership level.
 ✅ Best practice: Once a quarter, take your stated company values and ask honestly: "What decision did we make in the last 90 days that contradicted this?" If the answer is "nothing," you're either not looking or not being honest. Finding one isn't failure. Ignoring it is.
 💡 Quick tip: The fastest way to kill a stated value is to leave a visible behaviour that contradicts it unaddressed. If "respect" is a company value and a manager consistently talks over junior team members without consequence, the message received by everyone is: respect only applies when it's convenient. That message spreads faster than any culture initiative you'll run.
## The Manager Problem: Everything Flows Through the Team Lead
The most important and most underappreciated truth about culture is where it actually lives. It doesn't live in the leadership team's vision. It doesn't live in the values document. It lives in the relationship between a manager and the people they lead — and it gets rebuilt or destroyed in small moments every day.
This means that your culture is only as good as your average manager — not your best one. And if your managers are struggling, disengaged, or undertrained, no amount of culture programmes will compensate.
What good management looks like in culture terms:
- Giving honest feedback with enough safety that people can receive it

- Noticing when someone is struggling before they have to say so

- Protecting the team's time and energy from unnecessary demands

- Being consistent — not friendly one week and cold the next

- Taking accountability publicly, not just expecting it from others


 ⚠️ Warning: The most dangerous manager in your organisation is not the one who is visibly difficult. It's the one who is privately inconsistent — warm to some team members and dismissive to others, supportive in meetings and critical behind closed doors. That pattern destroys psychological safety without ever appearing in an exit interview.
## Psychological Safety: The Thing That Actually Unlocks Performance
Google ran a two-year study on 180+ of its own teams — one of the most rigorous investigations of team performance ever conducted in a business setting. The question was simple: what separates the best teams from the rest?
It wasn't talent. It wasn't diversity. It wasn't seniority or team size or communication tools. The answer was psychological safety — the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.
Specifically: can you say something half-formed without being mocked? Can you admit you don't know something without it affecting how people see your competence? Can you push back on an idea without it becoming personal?
The counter-intuitive finding: psychological safety is not about being nice. It's about being safe enough to be honest. The best teams Google studied were not the most harmonious — they were the ones where people could disagree, raise problems, and admit mistakes without those things being used against them.
 💡 Quick tip: You can measure psychological safety in your team right now with a single question: "In the last month, how many times did someone bring me a problem they would have hidden six months ago?" If the number is low or zero, the safety isn't there yet.
## Belonging: The Cheapest Culture Investment Nobody Makes Enough Of
Psychological safety is about whether it's safe to speak. Belonging is about whether you feel like you're supposed to be here.
These are not the same thing — and both matter.
Micro-exclusion isn't dramatic. It doesn't look like bullying. It looks like not inviting someone to a key meeting because it's "quicker without them." It looks like a team making a decision in a side conversation that someone else should have been part of. It looks like always asking the same three people for input and ignoring the rest.
The belonging fix doesn't require a programme. It requires attention.
## Recognition: The Simplest Culture Tool That Gets Used Least
Of all the levers in culture, recognition is the cheapest, most direct, and most consistently underused.
Recognition doesn't mean constant praise. It means people knowing that their contribution is seen — specifically and sincerely, not generically. "Great work this quarter" does nothing. "The way you handled the client situation on Thursday changed the outcome of that relationship" does a lot.
 ✅ Best practice: Build recognition into your team's regular rhythm — not as a special event. A weekly 5-minute slot at the end of a team meeting where one concrete piece of work gets named and acknowledged costs nothing and signals consistently that effort is seen. The consistency matters more than the scale.
## Onboarding: The Culture Moment That Sets Everything Else
Most companies think their culture is evaluated during the interview. It's not. It's evaluated in the first 30 days of actually being there.
This means that every decision you make about onboarding — who they meet first, what the first conversations are about, how quickly they feel included in real work — is a culture signal being evaluated in real time.
The gap between "welcome to the team" and "this is how we actually work here" is where culture loses new hires before they ever had a chance to invest in the organisation.
 ✅ Best practice: Designate a culture onboarding conversation — separate from the role onboarding — within the first two weeks. Not a lecture about values, but an honest conversation: "Here's what this team actually cares about. Here's what tends to go wrong. Here's what you can expect from us and what we'd like to be able to expect from you." That conversation, done well, is worth more than any company values poster.
Platforms like Joobs are starting to surface this cultural layer earlier in the hiring process — giving candidates a more honest picture of what working somewhere actually looks and feels like before they accept an offer. When that gap closes, both sides make better decisions.
## What Good Culture Actually Requires: The Practical List
You don't build culture with a workshop. You build it with decisions made consistently over time. Here's what that looks like in practice:
### 1. Address the behaviours that contradict your values — publicly. 
If a senior person behaves in a way that conflicts with stated values and nothing happens, that behaviour becomes the real culture. The response to bad behaviour — especially from high-status people — defines what the culture actually is.
### 2. Give managers the tools and support to do the hardest parts of their job. 
Most managers are undertrained in the things culture depends on — feedback, conflict, inclusion, psychological safety. Investing in manager capability is the highest-return culture investment most organisations can make.
### 3. Make belonging a deliberate practice, not an accident. 
Review who is and isn't being included in key conversations, decisions, and recognition. Inclusion doesn't happen by default in a busy organisation — it requires active attention and occasional correction.
### 4. Connect work to meaning. 
Gallup's data consistently shows that employees who can answer "my work matters" are the most engaged. That's not about grand mission statements. It's about managers helping people understand how their specific contribution connects to something real.
### 5. Create feedback loops that work both ways. 
Culture doesn't improve if leadership only hears good news. Build in regular, honest channels for people to raise concerns without risk — and act visibly on what you hear. If people raise things and nothing changes, they stop raising things.
 ✅ Best practice: Run a short, anonymous culture pulse quarterly — five questions maximum. But commit in advance to sharing the results with the whole company and identifying one thing you're changing as a result. The act of changing something is what builds trust. The survey alone does nothing.
## Frequently Asked Questions
Our culture is fine — people seem happy. Do we really need to worry about this?"People seem happy" is one of the most misleading metrics in culture. Disengagement is often quiet. People don't complain — they disengage and then they leave. Run the honest diagnostics: voluntary turnover rate, manager engagement scores, and anonymous pulse data. Happy faces in meetings don't tell you what's happening underneath.
We're a small company. Does culture really matter at our scale?Culture matters more at small scale because there's nowhere to hide from it. In a 15-person team, one toxic dynamic poisons the whole environment. And the culture you build when you're small is the culture you scale — for better or worse. The patterns you establish now will be very hard to change at 150 people.
How do you change a culture that's already bad?MIT Sloan's research is direct: culture change starts with behaviour change at the leadership level, not communication campaigns. You cannot talk your way into a better culture. The most effective levers are: replacing or coaching managers whose behaviour contradicts stated values, addressing the most visible cultural failures publicly, and rebuilding trust through consistent action over time. It takes 18–24 months minimum to see real change.
What's the single most important thing to focus on first?Managers. If your managers are disengaged, undertrained, or inconsistent, everything else you do on culture will underdeliver. Fix the management layer first — because 70% of your cultural outcome flows through those relationships.
How do we hire for culture without accidentally hiring for sameness?The distinction is "culture add" versus "culture fit." You're not looking for people who are the same as your existing team — you're looking for people who share the values that make your team work, while bringing perspectives and experiences that the team currently lacks. Write it that way in every job brief.

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*Source: [Joobs.be](https://joobs.be/en/blog/building-a-culture-that-doesn-t-suck)*