Culture Isn't a Poster on the Wall

Recently, I watched a team leader freeze mid-sentence during an all-hands meeting. Someone had asked what "innovation" actually meant at our company. After a long pause, he pointed to the values poster behind him and jokingly said, "Well, it's right there." The room went quiet. Not the good kind of quiet.
That moment stuck with me because it's so painfully common. We plaster values on walls, weave them into slide decks, mention them in onboarding. Then we wonder why they don't show up in how people actually work. The truth is, culture lives in the tiny decisions made when no one's watching. It's in how a manager responds to a mistake, which projects get greenlit, who gets promoted and why.
Nearly one in three CHROs admit they're unsure how to drive meaningful cultural change. I get it. Culture feels enormous and slippery. But here's what I've learned: it becomes tangible when we stop treating it like inspiration and start treating it like infrastructure.

When Culture Actually Shows Up

There's this thing that happens when culture works. You can feel it. Decisions get made faster because people know what matters. Conflicts resolve more smoothly because there's shared language. New hires settle in quicker because they see the patterns.
Organizations that embed culture into daily work see performance jump by upto 34% and engagement climb by upto 63%. Those aren't small numbers. But they only happen when employees can point to specific moments and say, "That's what we mean by integrity" or "This is how we collaborate here."

The problem is only 48% of employees feel personally connected to their organization's values. That disconnect doesn't happen because people don't care. It happens because we've left them guessing about what those values actually require of them.

I think about Maria, a product manager I worked with years ago. Brilliant at her job, deeply committed. But she kept butting heads with leadership. Eventually, she told me, "I thought 'customer-first' meant I should push back on unrealistic deadlines. Turns out it meant something else entirely." We'd never defined it. We'd just assumed everyone would interpret it the same way.

Meeting People Where They Actually Are

Here's something we don't talk about enough: not everyone starts from the same place with company values. Fewer than half of employees actually know what drives their organization's culture. That's not a failure of intelligence. It's a failure of onboarding, communication and follow-through.
Some people join your company already fluent in the cultural language. They've worked at similar organizations or they're naturally attuned to unwritten rules. Others need more support. They're still learning what good looks like here. And that's okay, as long as we acknowledge it.
I've started thinking about values proficiency the way I think about any other skill development. You wouldn't throw someone into a leadership role without assessing their readiness first. Why do we assume everyone understands our cultural expectations from day one?
Segmenting employees based on their comfort and familiarity with values isn't about labeling people. It's about giving targeted support. Someone new to the company might need concrete examples and frequent check-ins. Someone who's been here five years might benefit from coaching on how to model values for others. The goal is helping people grow from learning to living to eventually leading the culture.
When we did this at a previous organization, we discovered our most tenured employees sometimes struggled the most. They'd developed workarounds for broken processes and stopped questioning whether those workarounds aligned with our stated values. Fresh eyes from newer employees helped us see where we'd drifted.

Turning Abstract into Actual

Only 49% of employees know which behaviors actually align with the desired culture. Think about that. Half your workforce is guessing.
Values without behaviors are just nice words. "Respect" could mean a thousand different things. Does it mean we don't interrupt each other in meetings? Does it mean we give critical feedback privately? Does it mean we acknowledge different working styles? All of the above? Something else entirely?
I learned this the hard way during a diversity initiative that wasn't landing. We'd rolled out beautiful communications about inclusion. Everyone nodded along. Nothing changed. Finally, someone asked, "What does inclusion look like when I'm hiring? When I'm running a team meeting? When someone makes an off-color joke?"
We hadn't answered those questions. We'd expected people to figure it out. Spoiler: they didn't.
So we got specific. We created simple guides showing what each value looked like in common situations. Not rigid scripts, but clear examples. For "collaboration," we outlined what it meant to share credit, how to disagree productively, when to loop others in. We also called out what it didn't mean, because sometimes the don'ts are just as clarifying as the dos.
The shift was immediate. People stopped second-guessing themselves. They had permission to act. One team lead told me, "I always thought asking for help showed weakness. Seeing it listed as collaborative behavior changed everything."

Building Culture into the Bones

Here's where most culture initiatives die: they live in the people team's slide deck but nowhere else. Only 40% of employees feel their workflows support organizational values. Even worse, 43% of HR teams report their own systems don't align.
Culture isn't just about people. It lives or dies in your processes. How you allocate budgets, structure meetings, measure performance, make hiring decisions. These are your culture catalysts when they work, and your culture collisions when they don't.
I once worked with a company that valued "empowerment" but required five levels of approval for a $500 expense. Another that preached "work-life balance" while scheduling all-hands meetings at 6 PM. The disconnect wasn't malicious. It was invisible. No one had audited their processes through a cultural lens.

Start by identifying your biggest culture collisions. Where do your systems actively undermine what you say you value? Maybe your performance reviews focus solely on individual achievement, but you claim to prioritize teamwork. Maybe your promotion criteria reward those who work the longest hours, despite talk of sustainability.

Then find your culture catalysts. What's already working? One team I know built culture into their project kickoffs. Before diving into logistics, they spend ten minutes discussing which company values matter most for that specific initiative and what behaviors would bring those values to life. It takes almost no time, but it makes values visible and relevant.
The goal isn't perfection. It's alignment. When your processes reinforce your values more often than they contradict them, culture becomes self-sustaining.

What This Actually Looks Like

I'm thinking about Raj, an engineering manager who recently told me his team's retrospectives changed everything. They'd always done retros focused on what went well and what didn't technically. Then they added one question: "Where did we see our values show up this sprint?"
Suddenly, people were noticing and naming cultural moments. Someone praised a teammate for admitting a mistake early, living up to the value of transparency. Another highlighted how the team had pushed back on an unrealistic deadline to protect quality. These weren't grand gestures. They were Tuesday afternoon decisions that might have gone unrecognized.
"It made our values real," Raj said. "Not something HR talks about, but something we do."
That's the shift. From aspiration to action. From poster to practice.

Start Somewhere Small

You don't need to overhaul everything tomorrow. Pick one value. Define what it looks like in three common scenarios your employees face. Share those examples. Ask people where they see that value showing up or where it's missing.
Then adjust one process that's creating a culture collision. Maybe it's how you run interviews, or how you kick off projects, or how you recognize achievements. Make that one thing align better with what you say you value.

Culture becomes tangible through repetition and reinforcement. Through leaders who model values when it's inconvenient. Through systems that make the right thing the easy thing. Through conversations that connect daily work to bigger purpose.

The leader who froze during that all-hands meeting? We talked afterwards. He admitted he'd never really thought about what innovation meant in practical terms. So we worked on it together. Defined behaviors. Identified processes that supported or hindered innovation. Shared stories of what it looked like across different teams.
Next time someone asks, he'll have an answer. Not because he memorized a poster, but because he's seen it lived.
That's culture. Not the words on the wall, but the way we walk through our days. Make it visible, make it specific, make it part of how work gets done. The rest follows.

What's one process in your organization that contradicts your stated values?

Hit reply and tell me about it. I'd love to hear what you're seeing.

Until next time,
Making values visible, one decision at a time