How communications helps set your workplace culture
Ask most organisations about their culture and you’ll probably hear about their values, their employee engagement scores, their leadership principles and the behaviours they aspire to see. You might even get a beautifully designed set of posters reminding everyone to collaborate, innovate and put people first… but what happens when those values look great on paper and feel completely different in practice?
Workplace culture is what people actually experience every day, in the way decisions are made, expectations are communicated, mistakes are handled and people treat one another when nobody’s watching;which is ultimately where a lot of organisations get it wrong.
Culture is created in the everyday moments
Culture can feel like an enormous, abstract concept that's difficult to define, let alone influence - but at its simplest, it comes down to the behavioural norms within an organisation: the way people work, interact and make decisions together.
Those norms are shaped by more than formal values or leadership statements. They’re influenced by the unspoken beliefs, assumptions and expectations people bring to work, alongside the policies, processes, communication and behaviours they experience once they're there.
Think about an organisation that claims to value transparency but where employees are routinely left in the dark, or a business that encourages innovation but treats every mistake as a performance issue. Perhaps leaders talk about collaboration while rewarding individual achievement above everything else.
Over time, people learn which behaviours are genuinely encouraged, which ones are tolerated and which ones are best avoided. That's how culture takes shape, whether leaders have deliberately designed it or not and because every team has its own ways of working, culture isn't something that sits exclusively with the executive team or HR.
You can't survey your way out of a culture problem
When an organisation suspects something isn't quite right, the natural response is often to measure it through things like employee engagement surveys and focus groups. Then, the results are analysed and recommendations are developed, with action plans presented.
These activities can be useful, sure, because they can help identify patterns, understand employee experiences and highlight areas that need attention. However, collecting feedback doesn't automatically change the behaviours that created the problem in the first place.
If employees don't feel safe speaking honestly, the information collected might not reflect what they're actually experiencing. If people don't understand what's expected of them, another survey won't resolve the ambiguity. Plus if leaders aren't changing the way they behave, another leadership development program may not address the real issue either.
Organisations often focus on the outcomes they want to improve, such as performance, retention and engagement, without paying enough attention to the conditions that influence those outcomes. A more useful approach is to look at the relationship between psychological safety, leadership behaviours, engagement and organisational results.
Psychological safety matters because people need to feel able to ask questions, raise concerns, challenge assumptions and admit mistakes. Without it, the behaviours organisations want to encourage can become difficult to achieve, regardless of what their values say.
Engagement and business performance matter, too, but if the underlying environment isn't supporting the right behaviours, trying to improve those outcomes in isolation is unlikely to deliver lasting change. Instead of asking how to get people to perform better, organisations need to examine what they're doing to make the desired performance possible.
The expectations nobody talks about
One of the most common sources of workplace frustration is the gap between what people expect of one another and what they've actually communicated. We all bring assumptions into the workplace; we expect colleagues to respond to messages within a certain timeframe, take ownership of their work, flag problems early or know when to ask for help.
The problem is that these expectations aren't always shared. One person might believe that taking ownership means making a decision independently, while another might interpret it as consulting everyone involved before doing anything. Both believe they're doing the right thing, yet each can end up frustrated by the other's approach.
The same thing happens with responsiveness, accountability, collaboration and leadership. People assume everyone has the same understanding of what good looks like, then interpret different behaviours as a lack of commitment, competence or respect. Often, the issue isn't that someone is deliberately doing the wrong thing, but rather that nobody has clearly explained what the right thing looks like.
Teams can start addressing this by asking a deceptively simple question: What do we expect of one another here that we've never actually said out loud?
It's a practical starting point because it gives people an opportunity to surface assumptions, identify misaligned expectations and agree on the behaviours they want to see. From there, the conversation needs to become more specific. If a team says it values accountability, what does that mean in practice? What would people see or hear when someone demonstrates accountability? How should colleagues respond when a commitment can't be met?
Communication helps create culture
Communication professionals have an important role to play in shaping workplace culture, but that role goes well beyond writing leadership messages or promoting organisational values. The language people use every day influences how they interpret situations, make decisions and understand what's expected of them. The stories leaders tell, the behaviours they recognise and the phrases teams repeat can all reinforce particular ways of working.
Consider the difference between an organisation that tells employees to embrace change and one where leaders regularly share examples of teams learning from setbacks, adapting their approach and helping colleagues navigate uncertainty.
The first communicates an expectation, while the second gives people a tangible example of what that expectation looks like. Stories are particularly useful because they make abstract concepts concrete and they help people understand what a value looks like when someone has to make a difficult decision, manage competing priorities or choose between an easy option and the right one.
When leaders consistently share meaningful examples of the behaviours they want to encourage, they show people what those behaviours look like in the real world. Shared language can help, too. Short, memorable phrases can give teams a common way to describe expectations and reinforce the behaviours they want to see.
The key though, is that the language needs to mean something to the people using it. An acronym or catchphrase that has no connection to the team's actual experience is just another piece of corporate jargon. Whereas language that captures a genuinely shared understanding can become a practical shorthand for how people work together.
This creates an opportunity to work more closely with leaders and teams to identify the stories, language and everyday examples that reinforce the culture an organisation wants to create. It also means looking beyond whether a message was delivered or understood, and whether communication is helping people behave differently.
Culture needs to be designed, challenged and reinforced
Even with clear expectations and shared language, culture won't change simply because an organisation has agreed on a new set of behaviours. People need the capability to demonstrate those behaviours, leaders need to address situations where expectations aren't being met, and teams need to recognise and reinforce the behaviours that support the culture they're trying to create.
That requires ongoing conversations, not a one-off initiative. First, teams need to agree on their expectations, then they need to clarify what those expectations look like in practice and establish language they can use to communicate them.
They also need to consider whether people have the skills and support required to deliver on those expectations. If someone is expected to lead difficult conversations but has never been shown how, the gap may be a capability issue. Equally, there needs to be a way to address behaviours that undermine the agreed culture. If an organisation says it values respect but repeatedly overlooks disrespectful behaviour from high-performing employees, people will quickly learn which expectations actually matter.
Recognition is just as important. When leaders highlight specific examples of people demonstrating the behaviours they want to encourage, they make those behaviours visible and reinforce their importance. Expectations without clarification create ambiguity, clarification without capability leaves people struggling to deliver and values without accountability risk becoming little more than words. Culture becomes more deliberate when organisations pay attention to all these elements and make them part of everyday working life.
Start with the culture you have, not the one in your strategy
The temptation when addressing workplace culture is to start with the ideal future state. What should our culture look like? What values should define us? What behaviours will help us achieve our strategy? Those are worthwhile questions, but they're only part of the picture.
Before deciding what needs to change, organisations need to understand what's already happening. Which behaviours are being encouraged? What expectations have gone unspoken? Where do employees experience a gap between the organisation's stated values and the reality of working there?
Which means listening to people's experiences, examining everyday practices and being willing to challenge assumptions about how the organisation operates. It also means recognising that leaders don't have complete control over how culture develops. People bring different experiences, beliefs and expectations into the workplace, influenced by their backgrounds, previous workplaces, teams and broader societal norms.
What feels like normal workplace behaviour to one person might feel uncomfortable or inappropriate to another, so without open conversations about those differences, misunderstandings can easily become embedded in the way teams work. The aim is to establish enough shared understanding that people can work together effectively, even when their perspectives differ.
Most importantly, leaders need to be prepared to examine their own behaviour. Employees pay attention to what leaders do, particularly when their actions contradict what they've said. If leaders want people to speak up, they need to demonstrate that disagreement is welcome. If they want accountability, they need to own their own mistakes. If they want transparency, they need to communicate honestly, including when the news isn't good. Culture is reinforced every time people see which behaviours are rewarded, tolerated or challenged.
The real test of workplace culture
A healthy workplace culture is created through the accumulated experiences of people working together, day after day. For organisations that want to improve their culture, the starting point may very well be a conversation about expectations that have never been made explicit. For communication professionals, the opportunity is to help make those expectations visible, translate abstract values into practical behaviours, equip leaders with the language to reinforce them and tell the stories that show employees what the culture looks like in action.
