Defining Organizational Culture

The company needed a cohesive culture that aligned with strategic goals, but management and staff had different ideas about what that culture should look like. Without a shared vision, efforts to build culture risked feeling like a top-down mandate rather than something employees would genuinely embrace.

An organizational culture consultant initially kicked off the project and facilitated early workshops to explore the current state of culture. After these initial sessions, the project was handed over to me and my colleague for further development and implementation.

1. 01Mapped out employees' thoughts on the current and desired culture through in-person and remote workshops.
2. 02Ran a management workshop to identify the key elements of the new organizational culture and create clear descriptions to guide the following steps.
3. 03Designed and facilitated staff workshops exploring what these elements mean in day-to-day work  while encouraging open dialogue across teams and roles. Directors participated alongside employees, reinforcing a culture of openness and giving leadership direct insight into employees' perspectives.
4. 04Handed all workshop outputs to the communications team, who turned them into the written company culture guidelines.
5. 05Supported implementation: the guidelines were published in a kick-off event and integrated into onboarding materials, the website, and managers' training.

• Leadership-first buy-in: I sequenced the workshops by bringing management together after the initial employee sessions. This gave directors ownership of the culture definition while making sure it was grounded in what employees actually said, not imposed from above.
• Getting everyone in the same room: mixing teams and placing directors inside staff workshops dissolved hierarchy in the moment, so the collaborative culture we were defining was already being practiced in the room.
• Letting people define it in their own words: abstract values only stick when people describe them in their own language, so facilitation methods (metaphor exercises, dot voting, group enrichment) prioritized employee-owned wording over polished corporate phrasing.
• Built to hand off: workshop outputs were structured from day one so the communications team could turn them directly into official guidelines, ready to drop into onboarding content, manager training, and company events.

The management workshop was the pivot point of the project — where staff insights became a committed, shared culture definition. It was designed to secure genuine leadership agreement, not just sign-off.

For the full session plan — pre-work, timing, materials, and facilitator notes — see the guide below.