Article
Fifteen years ago, I stood in a break room and watched a brand new ping-pong table collect dust. Leadership had spent real money on it. There was a launch email, a photo, a little ceremony. Six weeks later, the same people who ignored each other in meetings ignored each other next to the table.
Fifteen years ago, I stood in a break room and watched a brand new ping-pong table collect dust.
Leadership had spent real money on it. There was a launch email, a photo, a little ceremony. Six weeks later, the same people who ignored each other in meetings ignored each other next to the table.
That table taught me something I've carried through three decades of work: culture responds to structure, and structure lives in the daily environment, the metrics you track, and the words you use.
I've watched organizations chase shiny objects because shiny objects are easy to buy and easy to announce. The teams that actually changed did quieter work. Here are the three strategies I've seen hold up in real life.
Early in my career, I inherited a team everyone described as "disengaged." The prescription from HR was familiar: bias training, personality assessments, a workshop on communication styles.
We ran all of it. Nothing moved.
So I did something simpler. I walked the floor for two weeks and mapped where work actually broke down. What I found had nothing to do with anyone's personality. Shift handoffs happened in a hallway with no written record. Two departments shared a deadline and had zero shared meetings. New hires learned the job from whoever happened to be standing nearby.
The environment was producing the disengagement. The people were just living in it.
Katryn Wright, managing director at More Than Now, makes this same point about inclusion work. Sustainable inclusion comes from redesigning the work environment itself, and efforts to de-bias individual minds tend to fade fast. My experience on the floor confirms her research. When we rebuilt the handoff process, created one shared planning meeting, and gave new hires a structured first thirty days, the "attitude problem" disappeared within a quarter.
💡 Practical step: Pick one recurring friction point on your team this week. Instead of asking "who is causing this," ask "what condition is causing this." Then change the condition.
Here's what I tell every team I work with: engagement is a systems problem, and systems are ours to redesign. That framing removes blame and gives you something you can act on tomorrow.
I once sat in a quarterly review where a culture lead proudly reported 94 percent attendance at a mandatory inclusion workshop.
I asked one question. I wanted to know what changed after the workshop. Promotion rates, retention by team, who got stretch assignments, who spoke in meetings. The room went quiet.
Attendance at a mandatory event tells you people showed up to something mandatory. That's the whole finding.
This experience reshaped how I measure culture in every organization I've worked with since. Participation stats feel good and cost nothing to inflate. Outcome data tells you whether the system is healthy. Wright's work points the same direction: leaders need to track tangible organizational outcomes and process health, and participation counts alone hide the truth.
Here's what I track now, and what I recommend you track:
Retention by team and demographic, because turnover concentrates where culture fails first
Who gets promoted and who gets stretch assignments, because opportunity flow is culture made visible
Time to productivity for new hires, because onboarding health predicts everything downstream
Where decisions stall, because process friction reveals silos before the org chart does
None of this requires new software. Most of it lives in data you already have. It requires the discipline to look at numbers that can embarrass you.
⚠️ Warning: The moment a metric becomes a trophy, it stops being a measurement. Track the things you're willing to see get worse before they get better.
I've found that teams respect this honesty. Front-line workers already know where the problems are. When leadership starts measuring the same things the floor already sees, trust builds fast. That trust becomes the foundation for every other change you want to make.
Years ago I worked with an executive team that had "inclusion" printed on the wall as a core value. Beautiful signage. Real money spent on it.
In private conversations, employees told me a different story. When someone raised an inclusion concern, the response was defensive. The logic went like this: inclusion is our core value, we already have it, so your concern must be wrong.
The sign on the wall had become a shield.
Wright's research names this exact trap. Promoting inclusion as an already achieved core value signals that the goal is met, which quietly shuts down further effort. Framing it as an aspirational goal keeps the door open for vulnerability, honest feedback, and genuine growth.
I saw this play out on an athletic team I coached. We stopped saying "we are a family" and started saying "we are building something worth belonging to." Small shift in words. Big shift in behavior. Players started naming problems out loud because naming a problem no longer contradicted the team identity. It contributed to it.
The same shift works in organizations:
Replace "we value inclusion" with "we are working toward a more inclusive workplace, and here is this quarter's focus"
Replace "we have an open culture" with "we want more people to feel safe speaking up, and here is what we're changing to make that true"
Pair every aspirational statement with a practical next step, because a goal without a step is just decoration
Language is structural. It sets what people believe is finished and what they believe is still in play. Keep the important things in play.
After thirty years in operations, I understand the pull of the shiny object. A ping pong table ships in a week. Environmental redesign takes a quarter. A pizza party photographs well. Retention data takes a year to trend.
I've also learned that people can feel the difference immediately. Front-line workers have finely tuned detectors for performative culture work. When you buy the table, they see a purchase. When you fix the handoff process that's been burning them for two years, they see leadership.
Connection comes first, and truth follows. I call this loving tough. You earn the right to push people by first proving you'll change the things that hold them back. Every one of the three strategies above is a way of proving exactly that.
Here's what I'd ask you to do this week, drawn from what has worked in my own career:
Walk your floor, physical or virtual, and find one environmental condition that produces friction. Change it.
Pull one outcome metric you've been avoiding. Retention by team is a good place to start. Look at it with your leadership group.
Audit one values statement your organization uses. If it claims a finished state, rewrite it as an aspiration with a next step attached.
Culture work done this way is slower to announce and faster to compound. In my experience, it's the only kind that survives contact with a Tuesday afternoon on the floor.
The ping pong table from fifteen years ago got donated eventually. The handoff process we rebuilt that same year is still running. That's the whole lesson, and it's yours to use starting today.
Want to apply this with your team?