How to Improve Company Culture: A Leadership Guide
Company culture gets a lot of hype on "About Us" pages, in job postings, and at work events. But hype is not enough, especially when too many cultures have become stale, toxic, and in desperate need of fixing.
Real improvement starts with a change in mindset and a clearer understanding of what culture actually is, why it matters, and what every leader can do about it. Organizations that want to attract and keep top talent need to move beyond the posters on the wall and start building cultures that people genuinely want to be part of.
What Is Company Culture and Why It Matters
“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” – Simon Sinek
Improving company culture doesn’t just mean Friday morning pastries, group lunches and occasional mini golf. Culture is the shared set of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and values; how a company represents itself, inside and out, every day, how teams communicate with each other, and how engaged people are. It should be the foundation block of an organization.
Economic downturns lead to cutbacks, but culture must not be one of them. A toxic culture is the primary reason people quit their jobs, with culture being 10x more important than pay in predicting employee turnover (MIT Sloan Management Review).
People are people, not worker bees or robots, and diverse, top talent go where they feel safe, respected, inspired and empowered. If you want to attract and retain the cream of the crop, you need to continually evolve your company culture with the perspectives of your people. Companies that improve company culture and the experience of employees in a recession not only thrive in the short-term, but also see sustained long-term growth (Great Place to Work).
The Role of Leadership in Improving Culture
Culture really is a mirror of leadership. A toxic culture is very often a symptom of bad leadership. If your leaders are embodying all the qualities of a bad culture, employees will follow suit. The cultural norms of a team comes down the worst behavior the leader is willing tolerate. Improving company culture starts at the top, through leading by example, and with emotional intelligence, so that everyone can come together to bring that culture to life. You can’t expect of others what you’re not willing to do yourself.
Every touchpoint at every stage of the employee lifecycle is an opportunity to improve company culture – from onboarding, to developing people, to measuring progress.
Actions speak louder than words or ‘Our Values’ posters on the wall, too. Maintaining a strong and inclusive company culture requires intentional actions from leaders that create psychological safety and an empathetic environment of innovation and growth.
Key Strategies for Improving Company Culture
Fostering Open Communication and Trust
Loneliness, resentment, frustration, fear – these emotions have no place in a healthy, inclusive company culture. Open communication should be constant from top to bottom of any organization. The way that trust is earned is through a simple, effective concept: psychological safety. The non-negotiable in the quest for psychological safety is vulnerability. Leaders can show their imperfections, talk about their struggles, their blind spots, and mistakes, so others can follow their lead. Open communication starts with leaders being open.
Psychological safety helps employees feel confident in expressing their own ideas without fear of ridicule. They feela sense of belonging and empowerment and take greater ownership of the organization’s goals.
Leadership training and company culture training helps leaders to increase their self-awareness, become more attuned to the atypical needs of others, and create a more human, more inclusive company culture of mutual respect, that embraces the needs of every employee.
Employee Engagement and Recognition
“Shaping your culture is more than half done when you hire your team” – Jessica Herrin
Have you ever gone above and beyond, pushed yourself out of your comfort zone, knocked it out of the park, only for it to go completely unnoticed by those above? It’s a horrible feeling.
So, if an employee or team does a great job, leaders should recognize that, thank them for their efforts, and demonstrate that they are personally invested in employees’ development. We all know that when we're praised for hard work and great results, we feel valued, proud and more confident for next time. Even better, praise mistakes. Make it OK to fail fast and learn. Reward the cultural aspirations of the team.
Improving company culture involves adapting to employee needs, so ongoing feedback is vital. Without feedback, employees could feel they’re doing a great job, when they’re actually off course.
When employees feel their voices are being heard, creative thinkers rise to the top. Often, these superstars are your future leaders, so current leaders need to learn to prioritize listening, and recognize and develop them.
Leadership training goes a long way to improve company culture. Managers can feel confident in delivering effective types of employee feedback and better understand which type of feedback is most helpful for each person, in each situation.
Promoting Work-Life Balance
Leaders should be setting the example in promoting work-life balance and should hold others accountable. We aren’t robots, and when work takes up all our time, and we don’t have the energy to spend time on hobbies or with friends and family, it can lead to stress and burnout.
62% of people said that work-life balance was the most important part of workplace culture (Mavenlink). When you improve company culture so that people are better able to juggle these two parts of life, employees feel more motivated and energized. 89% of companies with a more flexible work schedule saw a boost in employee retention, saving thousands of dollars in turnover costs and productivity (Zippia).
Implementing Culture Change
Are your team's goals aligned with the organization's purpose and goals? How well does your team trust each other and communicate clearly? Do they fully understand their roles and responsibilities? Do leaders regularly take the time to observe team dynamics?
Measuring company culture and team alignment can be a challenge for many organizations. DX Learning’s The Alignment Shift merges cutting-edge science and immersive, experiential learning to remove gaps and blind spots, and teach leaders the key to measuring company culture effectively.
No bad culture is beyond repair. If the culture has become ineffective, ignored, or inconsistent, it’s up to leaders to take charge.
Alex’s keynote, ‘Culture is a Mirror of Leadership’, helps leaders to ‘own’ the culture, rather than simply talking about it or delegating it to others. It’s a beginner’s guide to managing ‘cultural debt’ and ‘culture conning’, covering social learning theory, modeling behaviors, and how to re-wire primal biases for modern leadership, rooted in emotional intelligence.
CEO of Dober, Chris Dobrez, knew that if you take your eye off culture, people will create the culture for you. Integrating DX’s The CARE Experience as an anchor for leadership behaviors helped Dober to improve existing efforts and highlighted areas that they were blind to.
When you work to improve company culture through company culture training, you can reach new levels of diversity, agility, and responsiveness to growth opportunities – and leadership’s commitment is essential.
Ready to improve your company culture? Explore DX Learning's leadership programs or get in touch to learn how the CARE framework helps leaders build cultures where people thrive, perform, and stay.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you improve company culture?
Improving company culture starts with leadership behavior, not culture initiatives. Leaders must model what they want to see, consistently and at every level. The most effective practical steps include creating clarity around expectations and values, giving teams genuine autonomy, investing in real relationships built on trust and honest feedback, and ensuring every person feels fairly supported. The CARE framework — Clarity, Autonomy, Relationships, Equity — provides the operating model for doing this consistently over time.
Why is improving workplace culture important?
Because culture determines whether your best people stay. Research from MIT Sloan shows culture is 10 times more important than pay in predicting employee turnover. A toxic culture is the primary reason people quit and the cost of replacing them compounds quickly. Organizations that invest in culture during downturns consistently outperform those that cut culture programs when times get hard.
How long does it take to improve company culture?
Real culture change takes 18 to 36 months of consistent leadership behavior. It is not a one-time training event or a new values statement. The organizations that see the fastest and most sustained improvement are those where senior leaders commit visibly and consistently, and where new behaviors are reinforced through feedback, recognition, and accountability over time.
