What Is Workplace Culture?

An Orientation:

Workplace culture is talked about constantly, yet rarely defined with clarity. It’s often reduced to values statements, benefits, or how a workplace “feels.” While these elements may reflect culture, they don’t fully explain how culture is formed or why it has such a powerful influence on day-to-day experience at work.

When culture is poorly defined, organizations struggle to change it. Efforts focus on messaging rather than behaviour, or on surface signals rather than the systems that shape how people actually work together.

Some of the best plain language ways of describing culture are “It’s how we do things around here,” which is precisely accurate.

What People Usually Mean by “Workplace Culture”

In practice, workplace culture is often described through visible markers such as:

  • stated values or mission statements

  • office perks or benefits

  • leadership personality or tone

  • team rituals or traditions

These elements matter, but they are descriptive rather than explanatory. They tell us what culture looks like on the surface, not how it operates or why it persists even when organizations try to change it. There is often an over-reliance on the community aspect, not valuing the components of trust, and rituals and norms enough.

Why Culture Is Often Reduced to Values Statements

Values statements are appealing because they are easy to create and communicate. They offer a shared language and signal intent. But values alone do not determine culture.

Culture is not what an organization says it values. It is what people learn, over time, that is expected, rewarded, tolerated, or ignored. When values are disconnected from everyday decisions, they quickly lose meaning. To the extent that it does interact with values, it would be how people experience them in action, not how they are written on the wall.

This is why organizations can sincerely believe they have a strong culture while employees experience something very different.

A Clearer Definition of Workplace Culture

Workplace culture reflects the shared patterns of behaviour and meaning that shape how work actually gets done.

It is formed through:

  • repeated decisions

  • leadership responses under pressure

  • informal norms about what matters

  • unspoken rules about risk, voice, and accountability

The Foundations of Workplace Culture include Community, Trust, Communication, Feedback, and Recognition. These are the foundational pillars that culture arises from.

Culture is not static. It is reinforced daily through small actions and tradeoffs, especially when priorities compete.

The Difference Between Stated Culture and Lived Culture

Stated culture describes how an organization wants to be seen. Lived culture describes how people experience work in practice. Oftentimes, stated cultures can be performative or aspirational if they aren’t aligned with the lived experience of staff and teams.

Lived culture shows up in questions such as:

  • What happens when deadlines slip?

  • How are mistakes handled?

  • Who is listened to, and who isn’t?

  • What behaviors lead to advancement or exclusion?

When stated and lived culture aligns, trust grows. Trust is the second of the Foundations of Workplace Culture. When they diverge, people adapt to the lived reality regardless of official messaging. Worst-case examples are when the stated and lived versions of culture exist in an ironic relationship.

How Culture Is Shaped Day to Day

Workplace culture is shaped less by major announcements and more by everyday interactions. it happens automatically, subconsciously, in the briefest interactions and in our expectations of how things are likely to go.

Culture is reinforced through:

  • What leaders pay attention to

  • How decisions are explained

  • How conflict is handled

  • What is rewarded or quietly discouraged

Over time, these signals teach people how to behave, where to invest energy, and what is safe to say or do.

How Leadership Behaviour Signals Culture

Leadership behaviour plays a disproportionate role in shaping culture, particularly during moments of stress or uncertainty. What does the leader say? How do they say it? What do they demonstrate they care about through their actions, or inactions?

When leaders are under pressure, their responses send clear cultural signals about:

  • whether people are trusted

  • whether values hold when tradeoffs are required

  • How responsibility is distributed

Culture becomes most visible when conditions are difficult, not when things are going smoothly.

When Workplace Culture Becomes Fragile

Cultural breakdown rarely happens all at once. Early signs often include:

  • increasing caution or silence

  • reliance on rules over judgment

  • growing distance between leadership and teams

  • erosion of trust during change or pressure

These patterns can persist for long periods before becoming visible as disengagement, turnover, or burnout.

How Workplace Culture Connects to Well-Being

Workplace culture and workplace well-being are closely connected, but they are not the same thing.

Culture shapes meaning, norms, and behavior. Well-being reflects whether people have the capacity to operate within those norms over time. A culture that normalizes constant urgency, ambiguity, or overextension will eventually erode well-being, even when intentions are positive.

Imagine that we are almost marinated in the culture, and that it chronically impacts our well-being due to our longstanding exposure. Culture can predictably make us healthier or chronically pressure our health and well-being in negative ways,

Sustainable improvement requires attention to both.

Where Burnout Fits Into Culture

Burnout often emerges when cultural patterns consistently demand more than people can sustain. When overwork, misalignment, or lack of recovery become normalized, burnout becomes more likely, because Burnout is the inability to manage chronic workplace stress.

Seen this way, burnout is not just a health issue. It is a cultural signal that expectations, values, and lived experience are out of alignment and unmanageable.

Seen clearly, workplace well-being is less about fixing people and more about sustaining the conditions that allow people to keep showing up with energy, clarity, and care.

What It Actually Takes to Change Workplace Culture

Changing culture is not about slogans or quick interventions. It requires sustained attention to how work is structured and how decisions are made.

Meaningful cultural change depends on:

  • consistent leadership behaviour

  • alignment between values and actions

  • willingness to examine uncomfortable patterns

  • time and reinforcement

Culture shifts when people see that new behaviours are not only encouraged, but protected.