Workplace Culture

A playground slide in the break room doesn’t make a great workplace culture.

Ever toured a company that brags about being on those “Best Places to Work” lists, only to discover their employees are miserable? I did a few years back.

This company proudly showed off their “culture” – free snacks everywhere, that actual slide, and enough trendy perks to fill a startup bingo card.

Then I spoke to some employees who made it clear the culture was toxic. Ongoing  talent loss and poor business results proved that the culture indeed wasn’t all that and a bag of chips.

Here’s what I’ve learned after years of deliberate culture development: Culture isn’t some magical bowl where you toss in ping-pong tables, casual Fridays, and free beer and suddenly have “good vibes.”

Culture is how people actually work together day-to-day. It’s the behaviors that are encouraged, rewarded, and tolerated.

And if you want to achieve your business strategy, your culture damn well better be one that is intentionally shaped to align with your goals.

You can deliberately shape it, or you can leave it to the winds. I’ve seen too many leaders do the latter, often under the auspices that they want the culture to be “organic” and “authentic.”

But here’s the truth many leaders miss: Culture forms whether you’re intentional about it or not. And if you’re not deliberately shaping it, it might be actively working against your business goals.

Instead of treating culture as an afterthought (something that happens AFTER we’ve built everything else), what if we flipped the script?

What if we designed our culture specifically to support our business strategy?

Take a health tech company whose mission is ensuring patient access to care. What culture would they need to succeed?

• Innovation to stay ahead in a competitive market
• Flexibility to adapt to healthcare regulations
• Compassion to truly understand patient and provider challenges

If that same company allows and rewards behaviors that generate a cutthroat, empathy-free culture, they’ve created a fundamental disconnect that generates constant friction, and ultimately spells business failure.

Too many organizations only address culture reactively—throwing together “culture days” when retention tanks or adding free lunch when engagement scores plummet.

That’s treating the symptoms, not the cause.

Real culture work goes deeper. It’s about the behaviors that define “how we work here”—the expectations, norms, and unwritten rules governing daily interactions.

So I’ll leave you with this question: What culture does YOUR business strategy require to succeed?

And more importantly—are you building it intentionally, or leaving it to chance?