You do not fix a bad company culture by writing new values on the wall.

You fix it by changing what actually happens when people come to work.

What leaders do.

What managers tolerate.

What gets rewarded.

What gets ignored.

What happens when somebody behaves badly.

What happens when somebody raises a concern.

Whether poor performance gets challenged.

Whether good performance gets recognised.

Whether different people are held to different standards.

Whether promises mean anything.

Culture is not the wording on your careers page.

It is the behaviour your business repeatedly teaches people is normal.

If the culture is bad, start there.

Stop trying to fix “culture” as though it is one thing

One of the problems with company culture is that the word can become so vague that it is almost useless.

People say:

“We've got a culture problem.”

What does that actually mean?

Are people afraid to speak?

Do managers avoid difficult conversations?

Are good employees carrying weak ones?

Does every department blame another department?

Does information get hidden?

Are people exhausted?

Does nobody take responsibility?

Is there bullying?

Are standards low?

Is there favouritism?

Does nobody trust management?

Does everybody complain but nobody challenge anything?

Are employees constantly leaving?

Do people deliberately avoid making decisions because mistakes get punished?

Those are different problems.

And they require different interventions.

The CIPD makes a similar distinction in its current guidance. It argues that “organisational culture” can be difficult to define and therefore difficult to change, and recommends looking more closely at organisational climate, meaning the behaviours, practices, policies and experiences people actually encounter at work.

That is considerably more useful for a business owner.

Don't begin with:

How do we improve our culture?

Begin with:

What exactly are people experiencing here that needs to change?

Culture is what the business repeatedly allows

Imagine your company values say:

Accountability.

But one senior manager repeatedly misses deadlines and nothing happens.

What have employees learned?

Not accountability.

They have learned that seniority creates immunity.

Imagine another value says:

Respect.

But the best salesperson routinely talks to colleagues like shit because they bring in £2 million a year.

Again, the written value means nothing.

The real value is:

Revenue excuses behaviour.

Imagine you claim:

People first.

But every time the business gets busy, employees are expected to work late with no notice while managers disappear home.

The culture isn't defined by what you intended.

It is defined by what people experience.

This is why owners often underestimate their own role.

Every time you tolerate behaviour that contradicts the culture you claim to want, you quietly rewrite the rules.

The owner is part of the culture whether they like it or not

This can be uncomfortable.

The owner often wants to fix the employees.

Sometimes the employees absolutely are part of the problem.

But before changing everyone else, look at leadership behaviour.

Do you expect people to arrive on time while constantly joining meetings late?

Do you complain about poor communication while changing decisions without telling anybody?

Do you demand accountability but rescue managers every time things go wrong?

Do you say people should use initiative but criticise them whenever they make a decision differently from you?

Do you tell managers to manage while allowing employees to bypass them and come directly to you?

Do you want people to admit mistakes but respond to mistakes with anger?

Do you say family matters but message people throughout their holidays?

Do you complain that nobody takes responsibility while overruling every decision?

People learn far more from repeated leadership behaviour than they do from induction presentations.

Especially in a smaller company.

The owner is highly visible.

You cannot outsource culture while personally modelling something different.

Do not confuse a bad culture with a few unhappy people

This distinction matters too.

Every business contains disagreement.

Every organisation occasionally employs somebody who is difficult.

Not every employee will like every decision.

A healthy culture does not mean everybody feels happy all the time.

People can be disappointed by:

Pay decisions.

Performance feedback.

Promotion decisions.

Changes in responsibility.

Restructuring.

New expectations.

Poor results.

A healthy culture can still contain uncomfortable conversations.

In fact, sometimes the absence of uncomfortable conversations is part of the problem.

The question is whether patterns exist.

Is the same behaviour widespread?

Are similar complaints coming from unrelated people?

Are good employees leaving for similar reasons?

Does the same manager repeatedly create problems?

Are issues consistently hidden?

Do employees behave differently when certain people enter the room?

Do problems recur despite being “resolved”?

Look for patterns rather than assuming that either every complaint proves a toxic culture or every complaint is simply somebody being difficult.

Start with evidence rather than a culture workshop

If I thought a company had a serious culture problem, I would not start by booking an away day.

I would start by finding out what is actually happening.

Look at:

• Staff turnover
• Exit reasons
• Absence
• Grievances
• Disciplinary issues
• Customer complaints
• Employee survey responses
• Recruitment acceptance rates
• Internal promotions
• Performance problems
• Manager turnover
• Safety incidents where relevant
• Departments with repeated conflict
• People repeatedly leaving the same manager

Then speak to people.

Not just senior management.

Ask employees what gets in the way of doing good work.

Ask what behaviour is tolerated that shouldn't be.

Ask what they would be nervous telling senior leadership.

Ask where decisions become inconsistent.

Ask what happens when somebody makes a mistake.

Ask whether poor performance gets dealt with.

Ask whether managers treat people consistently.

And then do something enormously difficult:

Listen without immediately explaining why they are wrong.

If people don't feel safe speaking, you have less information than you think

This is why culture problems can survive for years.

Senior leadership says:

“Nobody has raised anything with me.”

That doesn't necessarily mean nobody sees a problem.

It might mean nobody believes raising it is worth the risk.

The CIPD defines employee voice as people's ability to express views, concerns and suggestions and influence decisions at work. Its 2026 guidance emphasises the importance of creating environments where people feel able to speak up.

The interesting part isn't whether you technically have a whistleblowing policy or an employee survey.

The interesting part is:

What happened the last time somebody challenged something?

Were they listened to?

Dismissed as negative?

Labelled difficult?

Excluded?

Thanked publicly and punished privately?

Did anything change?

People watch what happens to the first person who sticks their head above the parapet.

That teaches everyone else whether speaking up is genuinely safe.

Fix the things everybody already knows are broken

Almost every struggling culture has issues that are widely known inside the company.

The manager who bullies people.

The employee who is never held accountable.

The department that refuses to cooperate.

The director who undermines management decisions.

The person who gets away with anything because they have been there twenty years.

The top performer whose behaviour would get anyone else disciplined.

Everyone knows.

Often the only people pretending not to know are the people with enough authority to do something about it.

That is corrosive.

Because the lesson employees learn is not simply:

That person behaves badly.

They learn:

Leadership sees it and accepts it.

That changes the issue completely.

Standards mean nothing unless they apply to your best performers too

This is where culture and commercial pressure collide.

Imagine your highest-billing salesperson behaves appallingly.

They generate huge revenue.

They also:

Undermine management.

Talk down to colleagues.

Ignore processes.

Create complaints.

Refuse to share information.

The owner avoids challenging them because:

“We can't afford to lose them.”

Perhaps that is commercially understandable in the immediate term.

But understand what you are buying.

Every employee now knows the real hierarchy:

Performance first.

Behaviour second.

And once somebody produces enough commercial value, the rules become optional.

That can cost considerably more than the revenue you protected.

Standards only become standards when applying them is inconvenient.

Do not turn “culture” into a substitute for performance management

There is another version of this problem.

An employee consistently underperforms.

Their manager avoids dealing with it.

Resentment grows among colleagues who repeatedly pick up the slack.

Eventually everybody describes the department as having a poor culture.

Maybe.

But the starting problem might simply have been poor performance that nobody managed.

Acas advises employers to address performance and conduct problems fairly, and notes that informal conversations, listening, agreed improvements and appropriate training can often resolve issues before a formal process becomes necessary.

If somebody is unclear about expectations, clarify them.

If training is missing, provide it.

If support is needed, provide reasonable support.

If performance remains unacceptable, manage it properly.

The worst option is usually allowing the problem to drift for twelve months while everybody else watches.

Poor performance tolerated long enough becomes cultural information.

Managers are where culture becomes real

Employees rarely experience “the leadership team” in the abstract.

They experience their manager.

That manager determines an enormous amount of their daily reality.

How work is allocated.

Whether expectations are clear.

Whether feedback is fair.

Whether people are trusted.

How mistakes are handled.

Whether conflict gets resolved.

Whether bullying is tolerated.

Whether people receive recognition.

Whether information gets shared.

Whether priorities make any sense.

You can have a genuinely decent owner and still have a miserable workplace if several managers are dreadful.

This is particularly common in growing businesses because good technical performers get promoted.

The best engineer becomes engineering manager.

The best salesperson becomes sales manager.

The most experienced operative becomes supervisor.

Nobody teaches them to manage.

Then everybody is surprised when being excellent at one job does not automatically make somebody excellent at an entirely different one.

Management is a capability.

Treat it as one.

Train managers to have difficult conversations

Bad cultures often become bad slowly because nobody deals with small issues early.

Someone repeatedly arrives late.

Ignored.

Two employees stop communicating properly.

Ignored.

One person starts making undermining comments.

Ignored.

A manager becomes increasingly aggressive under pressure.

Ignored.

A department develops a habit of blaming another department.

Ignored.

Eventually the issue becomes serious enough for a formal complaint.

Acas's nationally representative 2025 survey of 4,558 working-age people in Great Britain found that 44% had experienced workplace conflict during the previous 12 months. Capability and performance were the most commonly reported conflict topic, and only around half of respondents experiencing conflict said it was largely or fully resolved.

Acas's 2026 work on dispute resolution continues to emphasise early intervention. In a representative survey of British business decision-makers, 52% of those who tried informal dispute resolution said that a workplace culture supporting open conversations helped them resolve conflict informally.

Managers do not need to turn every disagreement into an HR case.

But they do need the confidence to address things.

Early.

Calmly.

Consistently.

Stop rewarding the behaviour you claim to dislike

This is one of the quickest ways to expose a culture problem.

Ask:

What behaviour gets rewarded here?

Not officially.

Actually.

Who gets promoted?

Who gets bonuses?

Who gets access to the owner?

Who gets praised?

Who receives the most opportunities?

Imagine you claim teamwork matters.

But bonuses reward only individual sales.

Don't be surprised when salespeople protect leads.

Imagine you want delegation.

But every manager who asks the owner for help gets praised for “keeping me informed”, while people making independent decisions get challenged.

You just rewarded escalation.

Imagine you want people to stop firefighting.

But the hero who stays until 11pm rescuing a preventable disaster receives applause while the manager whose department quietly avoided the disaster gets ignored.

You just rewarded firefighting.

People pay attention to incentives.

Formal and informal.

Culture follows them.

Identify the behaviours you want instead

“Improve culture” is not actionable.

Be specific.

If accountability is poor, define accountability in behaviour.

For example:

Problems are raised early.

Owners are assigned.

Deadlines are explicit.

People report when commitments will not be met.

Managers challenge repeated misses.

If communication is poor:

Decisions are recorded.

Relevant people receive information.

Managers explain changes.

Problems are escalated through agreed routes.

If blame is the problem:

People can identify what went wrong without personal attacks.

Mistakes are examined for causes.

Repeated carelessness still has consequences.

Ownership is expected.

You cannot coach people towards adjectives.

You can coach them towards observable behaviour.

Define what will no longer be tolerated

This is equally important.

Every meaningful culture change requires boundaries.

Perhaps the business will no longer tolerate:

Shouting.

Personal insults.

Repeatedly undermining colleagues.

Withholding important information.

Blaming without taking ownership.

Ignoring agreed processes.

Bullying.

Discriminatory behaviour.

Repeatedly missing commitments without communicating.

Leaders bypassing their own managers.

Again, the list depends on your business.

But once you establish a boundary, enforce it.

Do not announce a new standard and then ignore the first breach.

That teaches the business that the change wasn't real.

Culture change will upset some people

This is worth accepting early.

If somebody benefits from the existing culture, improving it may not feel like an improvement to them.

Imagine a manager has spent years:

Making every decision.

Controlling information.

Avoiding accountability.

Treating disagreement as disloyalty.

Suddenly you introduce clearer accountability, employee voice and proper management standards.

They may hate it.

That does not necessarily mean the change is wrong.

Culture change alters power, expectations and behaviour.

Some resistance is inevitable.

The objective isn't universal happiness.

The objective is a healthier, clearer and more effective working environment.

Some people may need to leave

This becomes another uncomfortable conversation.

Can every employee adapt to a healthier culture?

No.

Some can.

Some will surprise you.

Once expectations become clearer, people who previously behaved badly may change.

But occasionally somebody has become fundamentally incompatible with the standards the business needs.

That might be an employee.

A manager.

A director.

Sometimes even a family member working in the business.

At that point, this is not a motivational poster problem.

It becomes a management and potentially HR/employment-law matter.

Handle it properly.

If formal disciplinary, grievance, capability, discrimination, harassment, whistleblowing or dismissal issues are involved, follow appropriate processes and take qualified HR or legal advice where necessary. Acas provides current guidance on resolving workplace issues and formal employment procedures.

Don't improvise employment law because you're frustrated.

Do not launch twelve culture initiatives at once

Bad culture often triggers overcorrection.

Suddenly the business has:

New values.

New surveys.

Weekly town halls.

Recognition schemes.

Mental health days.

Leadership training.

Suggestion boxes.

A culture committee.

Employee champions.

Posters.

Newsletters.

An away day.

People become cynical remarkably quickly.

Especially if the manager who has caused half the problems remains untouched.

Fix the highest-signal issues first.

If favouritism is destroying trust, deal with favouritism.

If managers cannot manage, improve management.

If people are afraid to speak, fix what happens when they speak.

If responsibilities are unclear, clarify them.

If poor performance is tolerated, manage it.

People judge culture change from visible evidence.

Give them some.

A practical 90-day culture reset

You will not completely change a deep-rooted culture in 90 days.

But you should absolutely be able to prove that something has changed.

Days 1–30: diagnose

Define the specific behaviours and experiences causing the problem.

Review:

Turnover.

Exit data.

Grievances.

Absence.

Employee feedback.

Performance problems.

Manager patterns.

Customer complaints.

Speak privately with people at different levels.

Ask where behaviour and stated values differ.

Then identify three to five specific cultural problems.

Not twenty.

Days 31–60: intervene

Take visible action.

Clarify behavioural expectations.

Address obvious management issues.

Resolve long-running problems.

Improve escalation routes.

Train managers where the capability gap is genuine.

Stop rewarding contradictory behaviour.

Make responsibilities clear.

Communicate what is changing and why.

Do not promise cultural transformation.

Tell people what you are actually changing.

Days 61–90: reinforce

Review what happened.

Have managers changed behaviour?

Are problems being raised earlier?

Have repeated issues reduced?

Are employees seeing consistent standards?

Are senior people following the same expectations?

Recognise examples of the new behaviour.

Challenge lapses quickly.

Then choose the next set of issues.

Culture is changed through repetition.

Measure behaviour, not enthusiasm

Beware of culture-launch feedback.

You announce changes.

Everyone attends the meeting.

Survey results say people are excited.

Wonderful.

What happened three months later?

Culture measures should relate to the actual problem.

If trust was poor:

Are concerns being raised earlier?

If management inconsistency was the issue:

Are similar problems now handled consistently?

If turnover was the issue:

Are regrettable departures changing?

If accountability was poor:

Are commitments clearer and misses challenged?

If conflict was widespread:

Is it being addressed sooner?

If employee voice was poor:

Are suggestions and concerns reaching decision-makers, and are people seeing evidence that speaking matters?

Do not confuse positive reactions to the launch with behavioural change.

Look at the systems creating the behaviour

This is one of the most important parts.

Sometimes individual behaviour is being produced by the environment.

Suppose customer-service employees are rewarded purely on call volume.

Then management complains that customers feel rushed.

That is not mysterious.

Suppose project managers have impossible workloads.

Then leadership complains they do not communicate enough.

Maybe.

Or perhaps the system makes proper communication practically impossible.

Suppose salespeople earn commission when the contract is signed but carry no consequence for selling unprofitable or undeliverable work.

Then operations complains about sales.

Again, not mysterious.

Ask:

What behaviour does this system make rational?

That question often exposes the gap between the culture you say you want and the culture your incentives create.

Fairness matters more than niceness

Business owners sometimes try to improve culture by becoming more generous.

More treats.

More socials.

More rewards.

Those can be perfectly enjoyable.

But people will tolerate the absence of free pizza considerably better than they tolerate unfairness.

One employee gets challenged.

Another gets away with the same behaviour.

One department gets flexibility.

Another never receives an explanation.

Somebody receives promotion because they are close to the owner.

A manager takes credit for their team's work.

Performance reviews depend entirely on who you report to.

Culture deteriorates when people stop believing standards are fair.

Acas states that employers and employees owe one another duties of trust and confidence, including behaving in ways that allow mutual trust and treating each other with respect. Serious breaches by an employer can potentially have contractual and legal consequences as well as cultural ones.

Fairness is not soft.

It is infrastructure.

Do not mistake silence for a healthy culture

The quietest workplace is not necessarily the healthiest.

People can stop arguing because they trust each other.

Or because they have stopped caring.

They can stop raising problems because the problems disappeared.

Or because raising them achieved nothing.

They can agree in meetings and complain afterwards.

A healthy culture should be capable of disagreement.

People should be able to say:

I think this is wrong.

I don't understand the decision.

We have a problem.

I made a mistake.

I disagree.

I need help.

That is far more useful than superficial harmony.

Acas's recent work on informal conflict resolution similarly emphasises open conversation, positive relationships, manager capability and environments where people can raise concerns without fear of retaliation.

You do not need a conflict-free company.

You need a company capable of dealing with conflict properly.

Your culture gets tested under pressure

Most businesses look reasonably healthy when everything is easy.

Culture becomes visible when:

Revenue falls.

A customer complains.

Somebody makes an expensive mistake.

The company gets extremely busy.

A deadline is missed.

A senior employee resigns.

Cash becomes tight.

Someone challenges the owner.

Watch what happens then.

Do leaders become secretive?

Does blame begin?

Do standards disappear?

Does everyone work ridiculous hours?

Do managers start shouting?

Does the owner suddenly take every decision back?

Or does the business remain broadly consistent with the way it claims to operate?

Culture is not what happens on the away day.

It is what survives the bad month.

Company culture also affects recruitment

This connects directly with the recruitment problem.

You can write the greatest job advert in Britain.

Candidates now have considerably more ways to investigate you.

They know existing staff.

They know former staff.

They check reviews.

They look at LinkedIn.

Recruiters know reputations within industries.

A poor culture eventually becomes a recruitment tax.

You pay more.

Search longer.

Use more recruiters.

Accept weaker candidates.

Then your strongest people carry more work while vacancies remain open.

Culture stops being a fluffy HR subject remarkably quickly.

It becomes operational capacity.

And retention

If good employees repeatedly leave, do not assume they all received irresistible offers.

Look for patterns.

One in three workers and managers surveyed in 2023 CMI/YouGov research reported having left a job because of a negative work culture, while the research also highlighted the influence managers have on employee motivation, satisfaction and intentions to leave. The study was conducted in 2023 rather than 2026, so it should be treated as supporting historical evidence rather than a current measurement of UK resignation behaviour.

The practical point remains straightforward:

People do not experience “company culture” separately from management.

They experience it through work.

What if the owner is the culture problem?

This is probably the hardest version.

Sometimes the owner's behaviour sits underneath everything.

Control.

Volatility.

Micromanagement.

Favouritism.

Permanent availability.

Poor boundaries.

Changing priorities.

Undermining managers.

Avoiding conflict.

Creating conflict.

Rescuing people.

Refusing to let capable people make decisions.

Everybody else can attend leadership training until Christmas.

Nothing fundamental changes if the owner continues recreating the same environment.

This is where outside challenge can be useful.

Not somebody to come in and announce your corporate values.

Somebody prepared to ask:

What are you personally doing that makes this behaviour rational?

That question requires considerably more courage than ordering a culture survey.

A culture cannot outperform the standards leaders enforce

You do not need a perfect company.

They don't exist.

You do not need everybody to be best friends.

That isn't the objective.

You need clarity about:

How people should work together.

What standards matter.

What behaviour is unacceptable.

Who owns what.

How problems are raised.

How performance is managed.

How leaders behave.

Then you need consistency.

When someone breaches the standard, deal with it.

When the system rewards the wrong behaviour, change it.

When employees raise legitimate concerns, listen.

When managers lack skills, develop them.

When somebody repeatedly refuses to operate within reasonable standards, manage the situation properly.

And when leadership is causing the problem, start there.

A bad company culture was built through repeated behaviour.

A better one will be built exactly the same way.