As we emerge from the COVID crisis, organisations of all kinds will be asking themselves some fundamental questions about their purpose, values and culture. There is an opportunity for businesses to radically redefine their relationship with employees, customers and society. We were presented with a similar opportunity following the banking crisis, but we dropped the baton. We can’t afford to make the same mistake again.

In western democracies, trust in institutions of all kinds is at an all-time low and falling. To play a role in reversing this decline organisations need to be seen to act with complete integrity. This means showing complete alignment between an organisation’s stated values and their observed actions and decisions. To demonstrate this alignment, organisations need to understand where they are culturally and have clear view of where they need and want to be and how to get there. In other words, they need cultural self-awareness. The uncomfortable truth is that very few have anything like this level of insight as they completely fail to measure and manage their cultures in any coherent way.

A major reason for this is an enduring belief in the myth that culture is intangible and difficult to measure. This has led many to see culture as something academic that can only be assessed through psychometric instruments based on complex models that require specialist training and accreditation to administer. This approach effectively excludes the vast majority of employees from actively participating in the process of understanding and changing culture, something that is essential to success.

Many organisations have sought simpler, more familiar vehicles for assessing culture. This is usually through employee experience or engagement survey programmes. These are however not fit for the purpose of measuring culture and very often the results are positively misleading. This is because culture largely exerts itself at an unconscious level. As Schein observed, most of what constitutes culture lies below the surface and those conscious ‘espoused values’ visible above the surface are inherently unreliable. These ‘espoused values’ are what we tap into through employee surveys. This explains why there can be such disparities between what organisations say and do or what employees tell us. For example it explains how 75% of employees can agree that their employer is meritocratic when it has a mean gender pay gap of 40% and how successive staff surveys failed to signal ongoing issues at Mid Staffs NHS Trust. The truth is, over the years we have unwittingly used such surveys to train and incentivise employees to tell us everything’s OK reinforcing the biggest single barrier to progress- complacency. Against a backdrop of corporate scandals and persisting inequities, employees telling us that everything is fine is a poor starting point for driving change. The organisations that drive the most positive change will be those that encourage everyone to constantly challenge their practices and acknowledge both individual and institutional misdemeanours and biases.

To make progress, we urgently need to adopt a simple, practical view of culture. The fact that culture exerts its influence largely unconsciously does not mean it is unknowable. It does mean that we need to take meaningful steps to get below the surface so that culture can be brought into the conscious domain where it can be purposefully addressed. The problem does not lie in how we define culture. There is a multitude of definitions and there is no point in adding to the list here. What does matter however is knowing how culture works. It is only when we understand the mechanism through which culture evolves, propagates and sustains itself that we can take purposeful steps to measure and manage it.

This mechanism has long been understood and quite simply it is the interplay between collective behaviours and the shared (and mostly unspoken) assumptions about the consequences of those behaviours. For a simple illustration of this, imagine you are a new team member where in meeting after meeting you see your manager making assertions that you know are disputable and yet nobody challenges them. This will probably lead you to conclude either consciously or unconsciously, that speaking up is not a great idea and the personal consequences of doing so will be negative. This may be a correct or incorrect assumption but what matters is that your behaviour is being shaped by the behaviours of those around you who also share the belief that speaking up would not be a great idea.

This is a very obvious example but most shared assumptions are acquired in more subtle ways. We often assume it is a fear of personal consequences that prevents people from speaking up and challenging potentially questionable or unethical behaviour. Our investigations of the issue reveals a more nuanced picture.  What often comes top of people’s concerns is the assumption that there will be an over-reaction which fails to distinguish between genuine human error, a mistake made in ignorance and a wilful breaking of the rules. This shows how in their efforts to create cultures of compliance, many organisations have inadvertently reinforced assumptions that supress the desired behaviours, in a way they would be completely unaware of unless they asked the right questions.

Similarly, investigating particular behaviours and the reasons of them a great way to measure how inclusive a culture. In certain work cultures women, and particularly women of colour, are far more likely than equally qualified men to exclude themselves from opportunities for promotion, expressing the belief that they need to develop their skills and experience before they can successfully apply. In more inclusive cultural contexts we see no such disparity in assumptions or behaviour. These are differences that we can measure and quantify. It is the behaviours themselves and the reasons for them that expose the prevailing culture for what it really is. The really powerful thing is that measures such as these actually predict real-world outcomes such as under-representation of minority groups at senior levels and the size of gender pay gaps.

Much can be learned about culture from investigating common assumptions around what gets valued and rewarded in organisations, particularly with regard to leaders and leadership. Our own research both in the UK, Europe and the US has shown that traditional traits such as decisiveness, confidence and assertiveness that are often widely assumed to be given greater value in talent management decisions than traits such as empathy, humility and open-mindedness. This type of assumption is a powerful driver of behaviours and outcomes. If I’m acting on this assumption while making a hiring or promotion decision, I’d be best advised to give greater weight to these more traditional traits. If I am applying for a senior post I would be ill-advised to accentuate how empathic and humble I am. The assumptions and the behaviours they drive have important real-world consequences. They not only tend to result in homogeneous male leadership teams, they also result in imbalanced decision-making where financial and business considerations are given greater emphasis than human or societal ones. The truth is that these two types of traits are in no way competing or mutually exclusive. They can and should coexist simultaneously and when they do, everyone benefits. After all decisiveness without open-mindedness is dogma, confidence without humility is arrogance and assertiveness without empathy can easily be seen as overbearing or bullying.

Another fascinating property of assumptions and behaviours is the extent to which they can be at variance from the beliefs and values of the individuals that compose the culture. In a recent survey of 6,000 NHS employees we found that while there was a strong prevailing belief that it was indeed the traditional leadership traits that were seen to be valued there was an even stronger and universal belief that the Trusts involved would perform better if compassion, open-mindedness and humility were the primary considerations in selecting leaders. This belief was shared by all employee groups at all levels without exception, a powerful example of how the culture as defined by collective assumptions and behaviours is not only different from the sum of its parts but often directly at odds with it.

The truth is there is nothing unmeasurable and unmanageable about behaviours, and the assumptions that drive them can easily be exposed if only we ask the right questions. Applying this simple model for understanding culture not only allows us to derive unique insights, it also actively helps the process of change. When a desired culture is expressed in terms of simple tangible behaviours, everyone can be actively involved.  It shifts the conversation from ill-defined and abstract concepts to what we need to do, how we can do more of it, what is stopping us and how we can remove the barriers. It helps us to gain consensus about what needs to be done and empowers everyone to be part of the solution. Now is the time to redefine how we measure and manage organisational culture. A continued failure to do so will be bad for employees, bad for customers, bad for wider society and for the organisations themselves.