In earnings calls this quarter, 87 S&P 500 chief executives mentioned "culture" — but almost none described how they measure it. A close reading of transcripts reveals a widening gap between executive rhetoric and organisational reality. The language has become more polished even as engagement numbers fall.
Read Full ArticleThis week's edition circles a single, uncomfortable question: what happens when the language of culture outpaces the practice of it? Catherine Winter's lead analysis of CEO earnings-call rhetoric sits alongside new research on engagement measurement and a Gallup figure that should give every CHRO pause. From the Field brings dispatches from practitioners struggling to bridge the gap between boardroom aspirations and lived experience, while Marcus Eriksen traces the political economy that makes genuine culture change so difficult. The pattern is clear — and it's one we'll be returning to throughout the year.
A longitudinal study of 340 firms finds that hybrid work arrangements become culturally embedded within 18 months — but only when middle managers actively model the behaviour. Without deliberate institutionalisation, hybrid policies decay into informal, inequitable practices.
This updated meta-analysis confirms the engagement-performance link (r = .43) but raises a critical finding: the relationship weakens significantly in organisations where engagement is measured but not acted upon, suggesting measurement without follow-through may be actively harmful.
Proposes a three-tier measurement framework that moves beyond headcount diversity to assess belonging, psychological safety, and structural inclusion. Early adopters report more accurate diagnostics but note the political difficulty of publishing results internally.
of US employees are engaged at work — a figure that has barely moved in a decade despite billions spent on culture initiatives
Gallup's latest State of the Global Workplace report reveals that engagement remains stubbornly low. The 2025 figure represents a one-point decline from the previous year, continuing a trend that raises fundamental questions about how organisations approach culture change.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2025
CHROs are leaving faster than any other C-suite role, squeezed between board demands for cultural transformation and budget cuts that make it impossible. New research from the SHRM Executive Network maps the structural forces behind the exodus.
Read Full ArticleAnnual engagement surveys are losing credibility. This piece profiles Unilever, Handelsbanken, and an unnamed US tech firm that have shifted to continuous sensing, qualitative deep-dives, and structural indicators — with mixed but instructive results.
Read Full ArticleMandated return-to-office policies show no measurable improvement in collaboration metrics, according to new Conference Board data. Instead, the organisations seeing genuine gains are those that redesigned physical spaces and meeting rhythms — not those that simply enforced attendance.
Read Full ArticleA tight labour market makes organisations talk about culture; a loose one lets them stop pretending. This essay traces how macroeconomic conditions have historically driven — and then abandoned — corporate culture movements, from Peters and Waterman through to the post-pandemic moment.
Read Full ArticleAI-driven productivity monitoring is reshaping workplace culture in ways that few leadership teams fully understand. From warehouse floors to white-collar remote work, algorithmic management creates a culture of compliance that undermines the trust organisations claim to want.
Read Full ArticleThe concept of "culture debt" — accumulated misalignment between stated values and actual practices — is gaining traction in governance circles.
Deloitte InsightsA move toward radical transparency in public sector culture measurement that the private sector is watching closely.
NHS EnglandAnother tech firm adjusts its remote work stance, though employee representatives suggest the motivation is real estate, not culture.
ReutersThe relationship holds only when teams also have clear decision-making authority. Safety without agency produces comfort, not creativity.
Stanford Graduate School of BusinessThe guidelines recommend that firms measure and report presenteeism rates alongside absence data — a significant cultural moment for Japanese business.
Nikkei AsiaThe numbers are stubborn, and they should trouble anyone who takes organisational life seriously. Despite two decades of sustained investment in engagement programmes, culture initiatives, and people analytics platforms, the proportion of employees who describe themselves as "engaged" at work has flatlined globally. In the United States, Gallup's figure has hovered between 30% and 36% since 2012. Worldwide, it's worse: 23%.
This is not a measurement problem, though measurement is part of it. This is not a generational shift, though younger workers are indeed rewriting the psychological contract. This is a structural crisis that implicates the way modern organisations are designed, governed, and led — and the engagement industry that has grown up around the promise of fixing it.
Consider the economics. Gallup estimates that disengaged employees cost the global economy $8.8 trillion annually in lost productivity — roughly 9% of global GDP. Organisations collectively spend an estimated $300 billion per year on engagement-related programmes, surveys, platforms, and consulting. The return on that investment, by any honest accounting, has been negligible at aggregate scale.
| Region | Engaged | Not Engaged | Actively Disengaged |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States & Canada | 31% | 52% | 17% |
| Western Europe | 13% | 72% | 15% |
| East Asia | 18% | 65% | 17% |
| South Asia | 26% | 58% | 16% |
| Global Average | 23% | 59% | 18% |
These numbers demand more than concern — they demand a fundamental reassessment of how organisations think about the relationship between people and work. The standard playbook — survey, analyse, intervene, repeat — has been running for long enough to judge its effectiveness. The verdict is not encouraging.
The engagement movement, which grew out of legitimate academic research in the early 2000s, made a series of conceptual errors that have compounded over two decades.
First, it individualised a structural problem. The dominant engagement frameworks locate the issue in individual attitudes — discretionary effort, emotional commitment, job satisfaction. This framing conveniently places the burden of engagement on employees and their direct managers, while leaving organisational design, governance structures, and power dynamics largely unexamined.
Second, it confused measurement with management. The annual engagement survey became a ritual — an end in itself rather than a diagnostic tool. Organisations invested heavily in increasingly sophisticated survey instruments while underinvesting in the organisational changes those surveys indicated were needed. Dr. Eleanor Mwangi, our Senior Editor for Research & Evidence, calls this "the measurement trap": the belief that understanding a problem constitutes progress toward solving it.
Third, it decoupled culture from economics. The engagement conversation has been remarkably disconnected from the material conditions of work — pay, security, workload, autonomy. You cannot build a thriving culture on stagnant wages, precarious employment, and relentless productivity demands. Yet the engagement industry has largely avoided this uncomfortable truth, preferring to focus on purpose, belonging, and wellbeing in abstraction from the economic realities that shape them.
If the engagement era taught us anything, it's that culture cannot be programmed into existence through surveys and initiatives. The organisations we've observed making genuine progress share three characteristics that distinguish them from the rest.
They treat culture as a governance matter — not an HR deliverable. Culture appears on their board agendas not as a sentiment score but as a set of structural indicators: decision-making speed, information flow patterns, promotion velocity, and departure reasons analysed qualitatively.
They invest in the conditions of work, not just the experience of it. Pay equity, workload sustainability, genuine flexibility, and meaningful autonomy are treated as cultural infrastructure — not "total rewards" line items.
And they accept that culture change is slow, contested, and never complete. The most honest leaders we've interviewed for this piece describe culture work not as a transformation project with a completion date, but as an ongoing negotiation between an organisation's aspirations and its structural incentives.
The great disengagement is not a mystery. The evidence for what drives it — and what might begin to reverse it — is robust and growing. What's been missing is not knowledge but will: the willingness to pursue changes that implicate power, economics, and governance rather than settling for programmes that leave those structures intact.
That will require a different kind of leadership conversation — one we intend to foster in the months ahead.
Past editions of The Culture Review. Each issue curates the week's most important culture stories alongside original editorial.
Catherine Winter analyses CEO earnings-call rhetoric on culture; new meta-analysis on engagement and performance; Gallup's latest engagement figures; CHRO tenure crisis; the political economy of "culture fit"; AI-driven surveillance and trust.
Our inaugural edition: the case for independent, evidence-based culture journalism. Plus: the state of organisational culture in 2026, a conversation with Amy Edmondson on psychological safety's next chapter, and why "culture eats strategy for breakfast" deserves a more careful reading.
Independent, editorial, evidence-based coverage of organisational culture.
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The editorial team behind The Culture Review.
Twenty years profiling CEOs, boards, and the people who work under them. Previously at the Financial Times and The Economist. Interested in the gap between what leaders say and what their organisations actually experience. Based in London.
Former organisational psychologist at the London School of Economics. Twelve years in academia before moving to editorial work. Evidence-first, deeply sceptical of wellness programmes masquerading as culture strategy, and committed to making research accessible without dumbing it down.
Former CHRO at a FTSE 250 manufacturer, where she led a five-year culture transformation through a merger, a pandemic, and a restructuring. Pragmatic, direct, and allergic to jargon. Now writes about what culture work actually looks like when you're doing it — not just talking about it.
Former people analytics lead at a Fortune 100 technology company. Built and led a 25-person analytics function before deciding she'd rather explain data than present it in quarterly business reviews. Makes data tell stories — and insists those stories include the caveats.
Political economist and former Financial Times contributor. Covers culture as downstream of power — the economic structures, political decisions, and institutional incentives that shape how organisations treat people. Based in Copenhagen, writes from everywhere.
Former product leader at two Silicon Valley companies you've heard of. Left tech to write about it more honestly. Covers the intersection of AI, automation, and organisational life — including the culture of the companies building the tools that reshape everyone else's. Based in San Francisco.