Culture is not an HR program, it's an operational environment.
In the first article, I proposed a simple idea: Culture is not an HR program, it’s the environment in which work gets done. But one question keeps coming up: If culture is an environment… How do you design it? And where do you start with a project this vast?
1. Moving from "projects" to the operating system
Most organizations approach culture as a series of initiatives: workshops, surveys, recognition programs, events, values posters. But an operational environment is something else. It's the full set of rules, routines, and decisions that determine how work actually gets done.
A simple question often brings clarity: If we removed all our "culture" projects, what would remain in the way we plan, decide, collaborate, and manage tensions? What's left… is your true environment.
2. Making the environment visible
Before "creating" a culture, you first need to make it visible. A simple diagnostic can start with three dimensions.
How we decide
Who decides what? Based on what criteria? With what level of transparency? Do important decisions truly reflect your stated values?
How we collaborate
How do teams talk to one another, coordinate, and share information? Where do things get stuck: silos, delays, political maneuvering?
How we reward (and sanction)
What is genuinely valued: speed, quality, mutual support, innovation? Who gets promoted, recognized, heard… and why?
The goal of this phase is simple: describe without judging. Name the environment as it is, so you stop confusing the desired culture… with the lived culture.
3. Defining the target environment
Then comes a more demanding question: What would our work environment look like if our desired culture were true in everyday life? Not in presentations, but in decisions. Instead of simply naming values, describe operational behaviours.
In an environment that values learning, what happens after a failure? In an environment that values collaboration, how are projects and meetings structured? In an environment that values trust, how are control, approvals, and access to information managed?
The more concrete you are, the more you are designing a work architecture, not a poster.
4. Pulling the real levers
An operational environment doesn't transform through communication alone. It evolves when you adjust the mechanisms that actually structure work.
Governance
How are decisions made? Who is in the room when it truly matters?
Rituals
What moments structure team life: reviews, retrospectives, 1:1s, team meetings? Do these rituals embody the desired culture… or contradict it?
HR processes
Recruitment, onboarding, performance, promotions, recognition: do they reinforce the desired culture — or the opposite?
Tools and rules
Do your KPIs, tools, and policies encourage the behaviors you say you want? This is often where the project gains real scope. Because you're touching organizational design, not just engagement activities.
5. Start small, but structural
The good news: you don't need to transform everything at once. You can start with one or two critical flows. For example: the way decisions are made, cross-functional project management, team rituals. You redesign these flows to embody the desired culture. You test. You learn. You adjust. Then you expand.
The key question always remains the same: Will what we're changing transform the way we work every day… or simply add one more initiative to the calendar?
6. From culture as message to culture as design
Designing an operational environment requires a shift in perspective.
Culture doesn't live primarily in what we say, but in what we make possible — or impossible — through organizational design.
HR doesn't "own" culture. They co-design it with operations, leadership, finance, and managers. And cultural change doesn't happen through campaigns alone. It happens through structural decisions, repeated over time.
If culture is treated as a collection of initiatives, a sense of incoherence is normal. But if it is designed as an operational environment, coherence becomes a design challenge. Yes, it's demanding, but finally aligned with the reality of work.
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