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Aug 29 2025

From vague to valuable: the metrics that make culture real.

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The first culture project I ever worked on wasn’t with a trendy startup.

It wasn’t with a progressive FMCG giant.

It wasn’t even with a leadership team or an HR department.

It was with… an IT department. In a bank.

Not the place most people expect to find conversations about “culture.” And yet, there they were, talking about culture at least a decade ago. Why?

Because they had just gone through a major restructure. Attrition was creeping up, engagement was sliding and people felt disconnected. They knew something was off, but couldn’t quite name it.

That’s the thing about culture. It’s often vague, intangible and difficult to pin down. It hides in plain sight until it starts to hurt. But when it hurts, it really hurts. You feel it in morale. You see it in turnover. You notice it in performance.

The trick to solving it?

Make culture measurable in a way people can understand.

Not through heavy organisational psychology jargon. Not through endless theory. But through the dilemmas people face daily:

  • Do I feel safe speaking up when something’s wrong?
  • Does my manager help me grow?
  • Do I have the autonomy to do my best work?
  • Do I feel connected to my team and our bigger purpose?

Culture isn’t abstract. It’s lived reality. And if you want to shape it, you have to measure, understand and act on it in ways people can see and feel.

Why measuring culture matters.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most organisations say they care about culture, but very few measure it in a meaningful way. They default to engagement scores or turnover rates because they’re easy to grab.

That’s like trying to measure health with nothing but a bathroom scale.

Culture is measurable. You just need to measure the right things.

If you want to know whether your culture is helping or hindering performance, you should be tracking:

  • Psychological safety. Do people feel safe to speak up when something’s wrong?
  • Autonomy. Do teams feel trusted to get on with their work?
  • Belonging and connection. Do colleagues feel genuinely connected to each other and the purpose of the organisation?
  • Quality of leadership. Do managers coach and consult, or just direct?
  • Values in practice. Do employees actually see the company values in action, not just on posters?

All this is measurable. The trick is asking the right questions that lead to tangible actions that can change behaviours, decisions, and lived experiences.

Google’s Project Aristotle showed that psychological safety was the single biggest factor in high-performing teams. Gallup’s 2023 Global Workplace Report confirmed that teams with high psychological safety are 76% more engaged and are 27% more likely to deliver strong performance.

That’s how specific you need to get. Not “do you feel engaged and motivated at work?” but “is our culture enabling or blocking your best work?”

From measurable to tangible to actionable.

Measuring culture is step one. The real power is making it tangible and actionable.

Numbers alone won’t change anything. They must translate into stories and actions that people can see day-to-day.

For example:

  • If scores show people don’t feel safe speaking up, the action might be to train managers in how to handle dissent and unlearn assumptions of the past.
  • If people say they don’t see values in daily decisions, leaders need to start naming values in action explicitly when they make calls.
  • If collaboration scores low, you can create opportunities for cross-team projects and measure whether things improve.

That’s when culture stops being fluffy. It becomes a system of choices, habits and visible behaviours that anyone can recognise.

And when employees see their feedback leading to changes, trust builds. That’s when momentum takes off.

So, where do you start?

If you want to make culture real:

  • Measure the right things.
  • Make it everyone’s responsibility, not just HR’s.
  • Think in journeys, not one-offs.
  • Act visibly on feedback.
  • Link culture to performance and profit.

When you do this, culture stops being vague. It becomes measurable, tangible, and actionable.

And when that happens, it’s not just employees who feel the difference. Customers do. Shareholders do. The whole organisation does.

Because in the end, culture isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s what makes everything else work.

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