Organizational Culture Assessment

Let’s start with something that makes people a little uncomfortable. Most companies don’t really know what their culture is. They might say they do. They might even plaster it across walls, websites, onboarding decks, and coffee mugs. But culture, the real, day-to-day stuff that shapes how decisions are made, how people behave, and how safe it feels to speak up, is a lot messier than a mission statement.

And the trouble begins when that mess starts spilling into places it shouldn’t: like your hiring, retention, or performance. By the time people are talking about “culture problems,” it’s already been in the water for a while.

So how do you actually figure out what your company culture is? You assess it. But assessing culture is not like checking the weather. It’s more like listening to a dinner party where everyone’s talking at once, nobody’s quite saying what they mean, and the silence between the words matters just as much.

This article unpacks how to approach organizational culture assessment with nuance, moving from the basics to the sticky, real-world challenges that come up when you try to look your culture in the eye.

What does “Organizational Culture Assessment” actually mean?

Let’s strip the fluff: assessing your culture means trying to understand how your company really works beneath the surface. Not how it says it works. Not what’s written on the wall. But what people actually do, say, value, and expect, especially when no one’s watching.

Technically, an organizational culture assessment is the process of gathering data (quantitative or qualitative) to understand the patterns of behavior, beliefs, values, and assumptions within a company. That could mean surveys. It could mean interviews. It could mean just sitting in meetings and watching how things go down. In the same way that a doctor wouldn’t treat a patient without a diagnosis, you shouldn’t try to change your culture without understanding what it currently is.

There are formal models for this, like Denison, OCAI, and OCI, and we’ll get into those later. But at its heart, this process is about making the invisible visible. It’s about holding up a mirror to your organization and asking, “Is this what we meant to build?”

If culture is invisible, where do you even start?

Good question. And one that gets more dangerous the longer you avoid it.

Many leaders put off assessing culture because it feels intangible, like trying to measure a mood. But just because culture is invisible doesn’t mean it’s unknowable. We all feel it. The tension before a meeting. The side-eyes after someone speaks up. The way new ideas are received (or not). Those are all cultural signals.

Starting often means choosing your lens. Some go the quantitative route: surveys with likert scales, benchmarks, and nice little dashboards. Others go qualitative: interviews, focus groups, storytelling. The best approaches use both. You measure what you can, then sit down and ask people what it means.

And here’s where it gets spicy: sometimes, what people say and what the numbers show don’t match. That’s gold. That’s where the work starts.

Why gut-feel doesn’t cut it anymore

“We know our culture is strong. People are happy here.”

Sure. Until they’re not. Culture is one of those things that feels fine, until it’s not. And by the time someone raises a red flag, it’s probably been a problem for months (or years). Retrospective culture changes are messy. Proactive ones are strategic.

More importantly, relying on “gut feel” usually just means you’re listening to the loudest voices in the room. Or worse, mistaking your own experience for everyone else’s. If you’re a founder or senior exec, you’ll never experience the culture the way a junior hire does. Power distorts perception. Objectivity, through real assessment, is how you correct for that.

And if you’re trying to scale, gut feel becomes even less reliable. What worked at 10 people won’t scale to 100. Culture scales weirdly, it doesn’t multiply, it mutates. Without measurement, you won’t catch the mutation until it bites you.

The problem with asking people to “just be honest”

Let’s say you run a culture survey. You promise anonymity. You beg for candor. And still, something feels… off. The results are bland. Suspiciously optimistic. Nothing like the grumblings you’ve heard in the halls.

Here’s the harsh truth, if your people don’t trust the system, they won’t tell the truth, no matter how many times you say it’s anonymous. If speaking up hasn’t felt safe in the past, they won’t suddenly spill their hearts into a Google Form.

This is why how you frame, communicate, and follow through on culture assessments matters more than the assessment itself. You’re not just collecting data. You’re testing whether people believe the company is worth being honest with.

Want real answers? Make real commitments. Show people their words have weight, and that the point of the survey isn’t to check a box, but to make things better.

What if the results are bad?

Now we’re getting into it. You ask the hard questions. You get real answers. And they’re… ugly.

Low trust. High burnout. People don’t feel heard. Leaders are out of touch. Suddenly the nice, fluffy culture you thought you had doesn’t look so great in the light.

So what do you do?

You breathe. You listen. You don’t rush to fix everything at once. And most importantly, you resist the urge to defend yourself. Culture assessments are mirrors, not weapons. When the reflection looks bad, you don’t smash the mirror, you ask what created the image.

Bad results don’t mean your company is broken. They mean people care enough to tell the truth. That’s a gift. Treat it like one.

Standard frameworks don’t always fit weird companies (and that’s okay)

Startups, by nature, are weird. They grow fast, break things, throw people together from different worlds, and operate on chaos, adrenaline, and Slack messages at 2am. So when you try to slap a formal model like OCAI or Denison on your company, it can feel… awkward.

That’s not a flaw in the model. It’s just a reminder that no framework will ever fully capture your company’s vibe. They’re meant to simplify, not explain everything. Use them as tools, not gospels.

And if you really want to understand your culture? Supplement the model with your own language. Ask the questions that make sense in your world. Culture tools are like IKEA furniture: they come with instructions, but you’ll probably have to improvise a bit.

Culture isn’t the same everywhere, and that’s not a bad thing

One of the biggest mistakes you can make is assuming your company has “a culture.” Singular. Uniform. Homogeneous.

It doesn’t.

What you have is a collection of subcultures. The sales team in Joburg has a different vibe than the dev team in Cape Town. Your hybrid marketing team in Amsterdam? Also different. And that’s fine. Expected, even.

The goal isn’t uniformity. It’s coherence. Think of it like a band: everyone plays different instruments, but they’re all playing the same song. A culture assessment helps you check whether that’s happening, or whether everyone’s just making noise.

So when you assess culture, slice the data. Look at differences across teams, roles, locations. Don’t average it out. That’s how you find the tension points before they explode.

Alignment beats perfection, every time

Let’s say your assessment results are “meh.” Some good. Some bad. A little conflicting. What then?

You don’t need a perfect culture. You need a culture that’s aligned with your strategy. If you’re trying to be the fastest shipping fintech in the region, your culture better value speed, experimentation, and autonomy. If it doesn’t, you’ve got a problem.

Too many companies have a mismatch between what they say they want (innovation!) and how they behave (endless approvals, fear of failure, meetings that should’ve been an email). Assessment shines a light on those gaps.

Your job isn’t to chase perfection. It’s to close the gap between what you want to be and what you actually are. And that starts with knowing the difference.

Fixing culture without fixing behaviour? Good luck.

A lot of culture efforts fail because they focus on vibes, not actions. They rewrite values, repaint offices, maybe add a wellness day. But the underlying behaviors stay the same. So nothing changes.

Culture isn’t changed by slogans. It’s changed by what gets rewarded, what gets punished, what gets talked about, and what gets ignored. If your assessment points to problems like fear, blame, exclusion, or passivity, you need to look at the systems and habits that feed those patterns.

That might mean changing how performance reviews are done. Or who gets promoted. Or how meetings run. Assessing culture tells you what’s happening. Changing it means getting into the guts of behavior.

And yes, that’s harder. But it’s also the only thing that works.

What does progress even look like?

Once you start changing things, you’ll want to know: is it working?

Don’t expect instant miracles. Culture change is slow, nonlinear, and full of false starts. But over time, you’ll see the signs: a bit more candor in meetings. A little less back-channeling. More ideas from unexpected places.

And yes, you can measure this. With repeat surveys, pulse checks, or even just observing which stories people tell. But the most powerful signal? When people start holding each other accountable to the culture you’re trying to build.

That’s when you know it’s not just top-down, it’s baked in.

Final thoughts: You can’t outsource this

Culture isn’t a project. It’s not something you can delegate to HR or consultants or a new hire with “People” in their title. It’s something you own. And if you’re leading a team, you’re shaping culture every day, whether you mean to or not.

Assessing your culture doesn’t mean judging it. It means understanding it, deeply and honestly. Then deciding what to keep, what to fix, and what to grow into.

You don’t need to have all the answers. But you do need the courage to ask better questions.

And culture? That’s where the best questions live.