How to Improve Company Culture: Nurturing What You’ve Built

It’s not uncommon to tune out when someone mentions company culture — especially if it’s become a vague buzzword or something that “lives” on a slide deck instead of in daily interactions. But culture isn’t abstract. It shows up in how decisions are made, the way tensions are handled, and whether people feel safe speaking honestly. 

Most cultures don’t break overnight. They drift. Small compromises stack up, feedback quiets, and behaviors that once felt aligned slowly become normalized. Improving company culture doesn’t require that you start over. Instead, identify where things have slipped and what needs work, and intentionally nurture your way back to a healthier culture for your organization. For leaders, the work is twofold: reconnecting teams to the values that once shaped the environment and modeling the behaviors required to bring culture back into alignment.

To rebuild a cultural climate that you believe in, you have to first recognize what’s important to you when it comes to ethics, goals, and the legacy that you want to leave behind. That process takes attention, courage, and consistency, but it’s also what allows culture to recover and endure.

When Culture Drifts (And How Leaders Miss It)

Culture drift rarely announces itself. There’s no single moment where leaders decide to abandon values or shift priorities. Instead, it happens quietly. Through unaddressed weak points, rushed decisions, inconsistent accountability, or long stretches without meaningful listening.

Teams often recognize these shifts before leadership does. They can sense it as meetings begin to feel different or as people stop offering dissenting opinions. Perhaps feedback becomes surface-level or disappears entirely. What was once an environment built on trust begins to feel cautious or performative.

Leaders don’t miss these signs because of a lack of interest or care. More often, it’s because they are focused on growth, delivery, and keeping things moving. But culture doesn’t stay aligned on momentum alone. It requires regular recalibration.

Improving company culture starts with acknowledging drift without blame. From there, the work becomes about restoring clarity, reinforcing values through action, and re-establishing trust where it’s been worn thin.

What Culture Isn’t

When a company’s culture begins to erode, it’s often because it’s been reduced to optics — perks, slogans, or surface-level messaging. But how an organization looks from the outside is irrelevant to what one experiences on the inside. What builds internal organizational trust is how we experience leadership, conflict, and accountability.

​When the word ‘culture’ became a marketing term sometime in the 1980s, people began to equate it with slogans and perks, but company culture is the way people are treated, whether they feel listened to, and the team’s ability to relate to one another. And none of those things can be in place unless leadership models those behaviors.

Everything in an organization comes from the top, from how people are treated to how problems are solved. It takes courage to speak the truth, notice the silent tensions within teams, and set an example for how a workplace should resolve disputes and build new frameworks. There are a few key elements that create a balanced and equitable culture.

Truth and Honesty Above All Else

One of the first casualties of a drifting culture is truth. When people don’t feel safe sharing reality — especially uncomfortable reality — problems multiply quietly, and trust erodes. ​The concept of truth-telling is hard to instill. If you think back to the time when you were a child, you probably learned from a young age that telling the truth can get you in trouble, and it’s much easier to lie. 

Remember that first time you got caught telling a lie? Chances are, the truth surfaced because one lie led to another, resulting in bad outcomes for all involved. Truth in a workplace is a lot like getting caught telling lies as a child: everyone suffers, and nothing is accomplished.

If you reinforce the expectation for truth-telling and honesty in the workplace (despite what the truth may reveal) and set an example of understanding and acceptance for mistakes made, the people around you will begin to see that there’s no real benefit to not telling the truth. 

Team members tend to lie and sneak when they fear getting caught or are unsure of how to handle a situation. But if you remove those roadblocks, problems become conversations that begin to foster a culture of truth and honesty above all else–and that’s the kind of culture that people feel safe in.

Show and Teach Listening Skills

Listening often deteriorates long before leaders realize it has. When teams stop believing they’ll be heard or that anything will change, silence tends to replace engagement.

Present, active listening takes practice, but most people don’t realize that. You may think you are listening when someone is talking to you, but waiting with an eager reply or trying to guess what someone thinks without waiting for them to explain can cause a lot of tension. As a leader, it’s your job to learn to listen first and set that example by never turning anyone away who has a problem or wants to discuss a frustration.

Give your full attention to team discussions, ask questions that elicit further responses, and clear your mind of any thoughts before a conversation. You can (and should) teach these skills to team leads, too, by doing the following:

• Schedule regular one-on-one meetings with team leads to understand, listen, and hear what’s happening.

• Consider hosting open forums where questions and feedback are welcome and heard.

• Train leaders in active listening skills as part of professional development.

It’s also important to close the listening loop by sharing what you heard and acting to implement changes that work, which, in turn, will demonstrate that you were actively listening. Listening attentively isn’t a one-time conversation: it’s a circle that completes when actions are the result of careful attention.

Psychologically Safe

Psychological safety in the workplace can fade when mistakes are punished inconsistently, feedback goes unacknowledged, or vulnerability is met with defensiveness.

People should feel safe and heard in the workplace. This means setting the tone for a psychologically safe environment, which can only happen when teams feel free and safe to express ideas and make mistakes without negative consequences. Allowing this type of freedom also tends to pave the road for amazing ideas and business innovations!

Psychological safety supports innovation, performance, and employee engagement, and quickly stops negative feedback, conversations, and behaviors. A fearful team is an unproductive team, focused solely on collecting a paycheck. A team that feels unashamed to speak openly and to suggest new ideas takes pride in its work.​

Leading By Example

​When your organization’s culture feels off, team-level fixes shouldn’t be the first response. Company culture is first and foremost a reflection of the leadership and executive team’s behavior, especially when the organization is under pressure.

You probably know that leading by example is the best way to set the tone in any workplace. But it’s easy to get caught up in business and occasionally forget this important rule. When that happens, take a minute, remember why and how you built the culture you did, and understand that mistakes are okay as long as you return to your core values.

Tending to Your Company Culture

Maintaining a strong company culture requires that leaders return to and evaluate the values that matter again and again, even after missteps or periods of drift. When leaders do that consistently, culture regains its footing and becomes resilient enough to move forward without constant oversight.

Organizations that thrive and survive are built through depth, trust, and intentional listening. When leadership models empathy, honesty, and truth, employees will feel heard and valued. Invest in human-centered values above all else, and watch as the culture you built moves forward rapidly even in your absence.

Improving company culture isn’t a one-time initiative—it’s an ongoing practice that requires intention, courage, and the right tools to sustain it. If you’re ready to move beyond surface-level fixes and build a culture rooted in radical honesty and psychological safety, join our free 14-day email course: Being Human Together: Cultivating Trust, Transforming Culture & Leading Courageously. You’ll receive daily prompts and inspiration to help you develop the leadership skills needed to create lasting cultural change, because the culture you want to build starts with the leadership you’re willing to embody.