Further Resources

Why Your Company's Culture Change Isn't Working

The PowerPoint slide read "Culture Transformation Initiative 2024" and I nearly spat my coffee across the boardroom table. Not because the coffee was bad (though it absolutely was), but because I'd seen this exact same slide deck in 2019, 2020, and again in 2022. Different logos, same empty promises about "revolutionary change" and "fostering innovation."

After seventeen years of watching companies attempt culture change with all the finesse of a wrecking ball, I've come to one inescapable conclusion: 94% of culture change initiatives fail not because they're poorly planned, but because they're fundamentally dishonest about what culture actually is.

The Poster Problem

Let me tell you what culture isn't. It's not motivational posters in the break room. It's not casual Friday. It's definitely not that bloody awful open-plan office your facilities manager convinced the CEO would "increase collaboration" (spoiler alert: it increased complaints about Kevin's tuna sandwiches, not teamwork).

Culture is the invisible set of rules that govern how people actually behave when nobody's watching. It's the difference between what your company handbook says about "work-life balance" and what happens when someone tries to leave at 5 PM on a Tuesday.

I remember working with a Perth mining company that spent $200,000 on culture consultants who recommended installing ping-pong tables and declaring every second Thursday "Fun Shirt Day." Meanwhile, their safety incident rate was climbing because middle management was still rewarding people who cut corners to meet impossible deadlines. The ping-pong table gathered dust. The culture stayed toxic.

Why Leadership Teams Get It Wrong

Here's what drives me mental about most culture change efforts: they're designed by people who've never actually worked in the culture they're trying to change. The C-suite sits in their corner offices, orders catered lunches, and brainstorms about "employee engagement" while the people on the shop floor are dealing with broken equipment and managers who disappear whenever there's a real problem to solve.

Real culture change starts with admitting that the current culture exists for a reason. Usually several reasons. And those reasons are often protecting someone's interests—just not the interests of the people doing the actual work.

Take Atlassian, for example. They've built an enviable culture not by installing meditation rooms (though they have those too), but by creating systems that actually support their stated values. When they say they value transparency, they back it up with open salary bands and company-wide updates on financials. When they talk about work-life balance, they give people genuine autonomy over their schedules.

Compare that to the "culture change" I witnessed at a Sydney insurance firm where management installed wellness apps on everyone's phones while simultaneously implementing a new performance management system that required hourly productivity reporting. The cognitive dissonance was staggering.

The Three Things That Actually Change Culture

After years of watching failures and studying the rare successes, I've identified three elements that separate real culture change from expensive window dressing.

First: Change the systems, not the slogans. If you want a culture of accountability, create accountability systems. Not punishment systems—accountability systems. There's a massive difference. Accountability means giving people the tools, training, and authority to succeed, then holding them responsible for outcomes. Punishment means waiting for people to fail and then making an example of them.

Second: Promote differently. This is where most organisations completely cock it up. They spend months crafting beautiful values statements about collaboration and integrity, then promote the person who hits their numbers by throwing colleagues under the bus. People notice. People always notice.

I once worked with a Melbourne tech startup that claimed to value "radical honesty" in their hiring materials. Sounded great until you realised that "radical honesty" in practice meant the CEO could say whatever he wanted to employees, but employees who gave honest feedback about leadership decisions mysteriously found themselves excluded from important meetings.

Third: Measure what you actually want. Most companies measure everything except culture. They track revenue per employee, customer satisfaction scores, and productivity metrics, but they don't measure psychological safety, trust levels, or whether people feel genuinely supported in their development.

Quality negotiation training often reveals these gaps faster than any culture survey. When teams learn to have honest conversations about what they need to succeed, all sorts of cultural dysfunctions come to light.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Change Timelines

Here's something nobody wants to hear: real culture change takes three to five years. Minimum. And that's if you're doing everything right, with full leadership commitment, and you don't have any major setbacks like redundancies or management upheavals.

Most companies want culture change in six months because they've convinced themselves that culture is just about communication and attitude adjustment. It's not. Culture is embedded in systems, processes, reward structures, and a thousand small decisions made every day. Changing culture means changing all of that, which means changing how people think about their work, their colleagues, and their future with the organisation.

The companies that succeed at culture change are the ones that treat it like infrastructure development, not like a marketing campaign. They invest consistently, measure progress honestly, and accept that setbacks are part of the process.

What Success Actually Looks Like

Real culture change doesn't announce itself with fanfare. It shows up in small, everyday interactions. People start admitting mistakes without fear of retribution. Teams begin solving problems collaboratively instead of defensively. Employees refer friends for job openings because they're genuinely proud of where they work.

I saw this firsthand with a Brisbane logistics company that spent two years rebuilding their culture after a series of workplace accidents had created a climate of fear and blame. Instead of hiring consultants to run "trust exercises," they invested in comprehensive management training for every supervisor and created transparent reporting systems that focused on learning rather than punishment.

The transformation wasn't immediate or dramatic. But eighteen months later, their safety incident rate had dropped by 60%, employee turnover was at an all-time low, and teams were proactively identifying process improvements instead of waiting for management directives.

More importantly, when I asked frontline employees to describe their workplace culture, they didn't quote company values or mention wellness programs. They talked about feeling trusted to do their jobs, knowing their opinions mattered, and believing that leadership genuinely cared about their safety and development.

The Implementation Reality

If you're serious about culture change—and I mean genuinely serious, not just looking for quick wins to impress stakeholders—you need to start with an honest assessment of why your current culture exists. What behaviours does your organisation actually reward? What happens to people who challenge the status quo? How do decisions really get made, regardless of what the org chart suggests?

Then you need to accept that changing culture means changing power structures. And people with power rarely give it up voluntarily, even when they intellectually understand that distributed leadership and psychological safety create better business outcomes.

This is why most culture change initiatives focus on surface-level improvements like communication training and team-building activities. They're safer. They don't threaten existing hierarchies or force difficult conversations about who gets promoted and why.

But they also don't work. Not in any meaningful, sustainable way.

The Bottom Line

Culture change isn't about making people happier or more engaged, though those might be side effects. It's about creating conditions where people can do their best work without having to navigate unnecessary obstacles, office politics, or contradictory expectations.

The companies that understand this—that treat culture change as a business strategy rather than an HR initiative—are the ones that actually succeed. They invest in their people not because it's the "right thing to do," but because engaged, empowered employees create competitive advantages that are difficult for competitors to replicate.

Everyone else just keeps buying more ping-pong tables and wondering why nothing changes.

Further Reading: Communication Training for Career Development | Professional Development ROI | Workplace Communication Excellence