Take 3 minutes to answer the following questions honestly (thinking about your team or organization):
Day-to-day consistency Are the behaviours valued in official communications (values, culture, internal brand) genuinely reflected in difficult decisions, promotions, and performance management?
Or do you often see a gap between what is said and what is done?
Connection between initiatives and operations
Do your "culture" activities (workshops, events, programs, surveys) concretely change the way you plan, decide, collaborate, and prioritize on a daily basis?
Or do they mostly remain separate moments that are appreciated, but without lasting impact on how work actually gets done?
Cross-functional alignment
HR, finance, operations, sales, marketing: are they pursuing objectives that reinforce one another (same success criteria, same signals of what matters)?
Or is each function playing its own tune, with sometimes conflicting messages and incentives?
Stability over time
If you stopped all your "culture" initiatives for six months, would the way people work really change?
If the answer is no, your culture is probably already embedded in your systems.
If the answer is yes, it's possible that your culture rests primarily on projects rather than on the way you operate.
I invite you to ask yourself this synthesis question: When I look at our organization honestly, is our culture integrated into our "operating system"… or is it mostly visible in a series of initiatives, events, and slogans?
If, in answering these questions, you realize that your culture mostly lives in initiatives, there is an opportunity here: begin designing it as an operational environment, not as just another project.
.svg)