How to Clearly Communicate Your Organizational Culture

The Importance of Being Able to Communicate Your Organizational Culture
Organizational culture exists either by design or by default, and it signals to employees how to think, behave, and get work done. It matters — to the people who experience it every day and to the business outcomes it produces. After decades of assessing organizational culture, our organizational alignment research shows that culture accounts for 40 percent of the difference between high- and low-performing companies, measured across revenue growth, profitability, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement. The critical question is this: can your leaders and employees clearly and consistently communicate your organizational culture?

Some Surprising Communications Research
While 83% of companies believe that what leaders say has a big impact on the importance of workforce culture, Gartner’s culture benchmarking survey found that what leaders communicate only has a 1% impact on being able to successfully align a workforce and culture.

The greatest impact?

• How leaders operationalize cultural norms into processes, budgets, business practices, and organizational structures.

The Key Steps to Better Communicate Your Corporate Culture

While corporate values are often showcased on company websites, embedded in leadership development programs, and printed in employee handbooks, on their own they are just words. Values represent only one slice of what it truly feels like to work inside an organization. Employees learn far more about the real culture from what actually happens — not from what is formally declared.

The real lever, as communication and leadership experts consistently point out, is not polished messaging or glossy materials. Culture is communicated through everyday actions, business practices, and leadership decisions. People pay close attention to what the organization expects, rewards, tolerates, and holds others accountable for — especially when the pressure is on and trade-offs must be made.

In that sense, communicating culture is less about telling people what you believe and more about intentionally designing how work gets done and how decisions are made, day in and day out. Culture shows up most clearly in moments that matter: who gets promoted, how conflicts are handled, what happens when performance slips, and what leaders do when values collide with short-term results.

Here are three key tips to communicate your corporate culture more clearly and consistently:

1. Define Your Desired Corporate Culture and Why It Matters
   Leaders are typically surprised to learn how unclear, misaligned, and fragmented their actual corporate culture is to their employees compared to their espoused culture. Truly living your desired culture and keeping your behavioral norms aligned with your strategy requires clarity, commitment, and vigilance. 
   
   Be clear about the key results and behaviors you expect. Then hold all employees  accountable for measuring up to them. Employees should clearly understand how you define cultural expectations, how they can live them, why they matter for your unique business strategy, and what happens when people go against the cultural norms.
   
   Whenever you have a chance, talk to your employees about what culture looks like, why it matters, and how to live it. Make sure that every internal and external communication aligns with your cultural expectations.
   
   The question to ask: do all employees know what is truly expected of them?
2. Lead by Example
   The executive leadership team typically sets the cultural tone for the rest of the organization. When respected formal and informal leaders model and value the desired culture, their behaviors and attitudes cascade throughout the workforce. If you want to communicate your organizational culture, make sure your leaders and influencers set a personal example of what they expect from others in terms of how they perform and how they behave.
   
   In terms of communicating cultural importance, “what leaders do” has a 5 times greater impact than “what leaders say.”
   
   The question to ask: do your leaders consistently demonstrate what it looks like to successfully live your cultural norms?
3. Weave Your Culture Into How Work Gets Done
   Ideally, each cultural attribute is deeply integrated into every communication and business process. From interviewing for cultural fit, to onboarding, performance management, promotions, succession planning, teaming, sharing information, and decision making your cultural expectations should be aligned with, and part of, your people AND business priorities.
   
   Stand alone communications do not change behave. You need cultural accountability and alignment. In terms of communicating cultural importance, how work gets done has a 18 times greater impact than “what leaders say” and a 3 times greater impact than “how leaders behave.”
   
   The question to ask: does the way work gets done fully align with your desired workplace culture?

The Bottom Line
Most organizations rely heavily on messaging to shape their desired culture. But clear cultural communication requires far more than words. Leaders must translate cultural intent into everyday reality by embedding key cultural attributes into how decisions are made, how work gets done, and how people are rewarded and held accountable — every day..

To learn more about how to clearly communicate your organizational culture, download The 3 Research-Backed Levels of Culture that You Must Get Right to Create Higher Performance

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.