How HR Should View Workplace Culture

HR’s View of Workplace Culture Needs to Change
Can you honestly say your workplace culture actively supports your business goals? If not, it’s time to pause, take a hard look, and treat culture as a strategic business challenge. HR should view workplace culture not as a peripheral concern but as a strategic imperative that drives organizational performance.

Why HR’s Current Perspective Falls Short
Too often, HR leaders see culture narrowly — as employee engagement, corporate values, or organizational health — disconnected from measurable business outcomes. This view is reinforced when business leaders dismiss culture as unquantifiable, leaving HR unable to influence performance meaningfully.

But culture is far more than values on a poster or engagement survey scores. It is the way work truly gets done, every day.

The True Definition of Workplace Culture
We define culture as the combination of assumptions, practices, and behaviors that shape how work actually happens. Organizational cultures exist either by design — deliberately crafted to accelerate strategy — or by default, evolving reactively without alignment to strategic priorities. High-performing cultures consistently drive both business and people strategies forward.

The Problem with Many Corporate Cultures
A recent Gartner study found that 69% of HR leaders believe their organizations lack the culture needed to support future performance. Most employees were unclear on the desired culture, did not believe in the current culture, and observed behaviors inconsistent with organizational values. The takeaway: cultural misalignment remains widespread, and opportunity abounds.

Why Workplace Culture Matters
Culture-savvy organizations use culture as a lever to outperform competitors. Research confirms this impact:

• Harvard Business School found that an effective culture can explain up to 50% of performance differences among organizations in the same industry.
• Our organizational alignment research shows that culture accounts for 40% of the variance in revenue growth, profitability, customer retention, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

Aligning Culture to Accelerate Performance
Strategy must flow through culture to succeed. Once your strategy is clear, leaders should take four critical steps:

1. Understand Your Current Culture
   Assess your current culture to determine how healthy and strategically aligned it is in the eyes of both leadership and employees.
2. Define Your Needed Culture
   Identify the culture across required to execute strategy effectively across ten key cultural dimensions.  While values and engagement initiatives can emerge bottom-up, the required culture should be defined by the leaders responsible for strategic direction.
3. Prioritize the Cultural Gaps
   Determine the 2–3 cultural shifts with the greatest impact on performance. Focus on what is achievable and critical for success.
4. Create Workstreams to Close the Gaps
   Establish project teams to ensure systems, processes, business practices, policies, behaviors, and attitudes evolve in alignment with the desired culture.

The Bottom Line
Powerful cultures are not incidental. Shaping and nurturing culture to align with strategy is an essential task of leaders. When done right, a well-designed culture benefits both people and business, turning alignment into sustainable performance and competitive advantage..

To learn more about how HR should view workplace culture, download The 3 Reserach-Backed “C’s” Required to Create a High Performance Culture