How to Reinforce Your Preferred Workplace Culture
Leaders — particularly those building new teams or guiding organizations through early growth — often invest significant effort in shaping and supporting their desired workplace culture that reflects their values and vision. Yet, the question inevitably arises: How do you ensure your preferred culture takes hold and endures?
Culture isn’t just a set of aspirational statements on a wall. It is experienced when leaders and employees consistently act in alignment with shared beliefs, values, and behaviors. When this alignment exists, work feels:
- Cohesive.
- Purposeful.
- Motivating.
Our organizational alignment research shows that a well-aligned culture drives tangible business outcomes. In fact, cultural alignment accounts for roughly 40% of the performance gap between high- and low-performing companies — impacting revenue growth, profitability, employee engagement, customer loyalty, and leadership effectiveness.
Yet culture doesn’t sustain itself. With so many internal and external forces shaping employee behavior, even the strongest culture can erode over time if it isn’t actively reinforced. Leaders must be deliberate — embedding cultural expectations into everyday business practices, decision-making, and recognition systems — to ensure the culture remains visible, relevant, and influential.
How to Reinforce Your Preferred Workplace Culture
Because strategy must go through culture and people to be fully executed, changes in leadership, strategy, or business circumstances often create the need to change how work gets done. Here are steps you can take to strengthen and reinforce your preferred workplace culture:
- Consistently Measure and Invest In Organizational Health
We define organizational health as the strength of leadership, trust, capability, and climate — the cultural foundation on which high performance is built. McKinsey recently reported that the top quartile of the healthiest publicly traded companies delivers nearly three times the value to shareholders compared with their peers.
Because leadership, trust, capability, and climate naturally shift over time, it is critical to gather consistent, frequent employee feedback on organizational health. Your goal is to keep the organization in peak condition — maximizing performance, engagement, discretionary effort, and retention. While no company achieves perfect organizational health, it must be strong enough — particularly in leadership and trust — to provide a solid foundation for sustained high performance.
Once you have assessed your current culture, take meaningful engagement actions: maintain what is working, monitor areas at risk, leverage organizational strengths, and prioritize “repairs” for the few critical areas that are underperforming. This disciplined approach ensures that your culture remains resilient, adaptive, and capable of supporting your strategic objectives.
- Build a High Performance Culture
As Lee Ross and Malcolm Gladwell have shown, external circumstances and social contexts profoundly shape behavior — particularly in performance-driven environments. This insight underscores why leaders are accountable for creating conditions in which their people can thrive — conditions that are fully aligned with the organization’s core values, behaviors, and strategic priorities.
Our organizational alignment research reveals that building a high performance culture requires clarity, transparency, alignment, credibility, believability, and commitment across every facet of work: goals and accountabilities, success metrics, roles, behaviors, scope, interdependencies, action plans, and accountability mechanisms. When these elements are clearly defined and consistently reinforced, employees understand exactly how to contribute to organizational success.
High-performance cultures generate motivation in three ways: providing positive reinforcement for desired behaviors, giving corrective feedback for undesired behaviors, and creating compelling reasons for individuals to stay, improve, and grow. Every system that communicates, exposes, and manages performance — from recognition programs to operational workflows — must reinforce the desired culture. When these systems fall out of alignment, both culture and business performance suffer.
- Hire and Orient to Your Preferred Workplace Culture
Workplace culture should be an explicit part of your hiring conversations — not an afterthought. Discussing your culture during interviews not only helps assess fit but also gives you a competitive edge when candidates are weighing multiple offers.
Onboarding is equally critical. From day one, every new employee should experience your preferred culture in action. This is your opportunity to reinforce core values, explain why they matter, and help each new hire feel like a fully integrated member of the organization. When culture is embedded from the start, it sets the tone for engagement, collaboration, and long-term performance.
- Ensure that The Way Work Gets Done Aligns with Your Strategy
Even the most well-intentioned strategies can fail when underlying belief systems — often fragmented and invisible — shape how people interpret and act on strategic goals. To accelerate strategy execution, the critical business practices and mindsets needed to understand and deliver on strategic priorities must be deliberately articulated, measured, and aligned.
Our research identifies 10 dimensions of a purposefully aligned culture that enable employees to act with a unified and cohesive mindset. This framework defines the continuum of beliefs and behaviors required to execute strategy effectively — making it clearer how work should get done and removing the friction that slows progress. When alignment is intentional, execution becomes more predictable, consistent, and impactful.
The Bottom Line
When workplace culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies, the right culture, whatever that may be in your unique situation, matters. Are you doing all you can to strengthen and reinforce your preferred workplace culture?
To learn more about turning your workplace culture into a competitive advantage, download The 3 C’s of Culture that You Must Get Right
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.
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