How HR Should View Workplace Culture to Drive Business Performance

HR’s View of Workplace Culture Needs to Change
Can you honestly say your workplace culture helps your organization achieve its most important business and people goals?

If not, it’s time to stop viewing culture as an HR initiative and start treating it as a business strategy. HR should see workplace culture not as a peripheral concern, but as a strategic asset that:

• Enables strategy execution.
• Improves performance and engagement.
• Creates sustainable competitive advantage.

How HR Should View Workplace Culture to Drive Business Performance

Too often, HR leaders define culture too narrowly — focusing on employee engagement, corporate values, or organizational health without connecting those efforts to measurable business outcomes. At the same time, many executives dismiss culture as too intangible to manage, leaving HR struggling to demonstrate its strategic value.

Both perspectives miss the point.

Culture is not an end in itself. It is the operating system that determines how work actually gets done. When culture aligns with strategy, it accelerates execution. When it does not, even the best strategies and people struggle to succeed.

The True Definition of Workplace Culture
We define workplace culture as the shared assumptions, behaviors, and business practices that shape how work actually gets done every day.

Every organization has a culture. The difference is whether it exists:

• By design — intentionally shaped to support strategic priorities and desired business outcomes.
• By default — evolving organically through habits, history, and inconsistent leadership behaviors.

High-performing organizations deliberately build high performing cultures that reinforce both business and people strategies.

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 business performance. Employees frequently reported being unclear about the desired culture, questioning whether leaders truly modeled it, and observing behaviors that contradicted stated values.

These findings highlight a common challenge: organizations often know the culture they want but fail to create the conditions required to achieve and reinforce it.

Why Workplace Culture Matters
Organizations that intentionally align culture with strategy consistently outperform those that do not. Research demonstrates the impact:

• Harvard Business School found that an effective culture can explain up to 50% of performance differences among organizations operating 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.

Culture is not simply about creating a better place to work. It is about creating the conditions for better business performance.

Four Steps to Align Workplace Culture with Business Strategy
Once strategic priorities are clear, leaders should focus on four essential actions.

1. Assess Your Current Culture
   Understand your existing culture from the perspectives of both leaders and employees. Determine how healthy it is and, more importantly, how well it supports your strategic objectives.
2. Define the Culture You Need
   Identify the specific cultural attributes required to execute your strategy successfully across the organization’s 10 key cultural dimensions. While values and engagement can emerge from throughout the organization, the target culture should be defined by leaders responsible for delivering business results.
3. Prioritize the Biggest Cultural Gaps
   Avoid trying to change everything at once. Identify the two or three cultural shifts that will have the greatest impact on execution and organizational performance.
4. Build Workstreams to Close the Gaps
   Translate culture into action by aligning leadership behaviors, management practices, decision-making processes, performance management, rewards, policies, communication, and operating systems with the desired culture.

The Bottom Line
Workplace culture is not an HR program or an employee engagement initiative. It is a strategic business capability that either accelerates or hinders organizational performance. HR creates the greatest value when it helps leaders intentionally design a powerful culture that enables strategy, reinforces the right behaviors, and improves measurable business results.

To learn how to create a culture that drives measurable business performance, download The 3 Research-Backed “C’s” Required to Create a High-Performance Culture.

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.