Assessing Organisational Culture: A CEO's Step-by-Step How-To

For any CEO, the ability to assess and understand organisational culture is vital to steering the company in the right direction. Yet, culture can often feel like an intangible force—hard to grasp, yet profoundly influential on your team’s morale, productivity, and the overall health of your business. Especially in scaling startups or SMEs, where rapid growth can outpace the refinement of culture, a CEO’s insight into this area is not just valuable but essential.

In this article, I'll walk you through a practical, step-by-step guide to assessing your organisational culture. I’ll share some tools and strategies that I’ve found helpful over the years and offer some real-world insights on navigating this often tricky terrain.

1. Start with Self-Reflection: What Is the Culture Today?

The first step in assessing culture is understanding where it currently stands. As a leader, your perception of the company’s culture might be different from that of your employees, so it’s crucial to step outside your own viewpoint.

Begin with self-reflection. Ask yourself questions such as:

• What behaviours are rewarded within the company?
• How do teams communicate with one another?
• Are decisions made collaboratively or hierarchically?
• What are the unspoken norms that shape everyday work?

Your answers will provide a baseline of your perception of the culture, but it's important to validate this against the lived experiences of your team.

2. Collect Quantitative Data: Employee Surveys

While qualitative insights are valuable, you also need a quantitative measure of your organisational culture. Employee surveys can be an excellent tool for this. Many companies use platforms like CultureAmp or Peakon to gather data on various aspects of workplace culture, such as communication, trust, engagement, and values alignment.

However, to get the most out of these surveys, focus on asking the right questions:

• Do employees feel valued?
• Is there clarity in the company’s vision and values?
• Do people believe they can make mistakes without fear of repercussions?

It’s crucial that these surveys remain anonymous to ensure employees feel safe providing honest feedback. Analyse the data thoroughly—what themes emerge? What aspects of the culture seem to be thriving, and where are the cracks starting to show?

3. Observe the Unsaid: Walk the Floor

While surveys are powerful, they only provide a snapshot. To truly understand your culture, you need to get out of your office and into the trenches. Observe how your employees interact during the day-to-day.

Look out for:

• How people greet one another in the mornings—are they friendly or transactional?
• The tone of conversations—are they open, collaborative, or perhaps strained?
• Who speaks up in meetings and who stays silent?

These small moments offer a lot of insight into the underlying culture. For example, if you notice a high degree of politeness but little constructive debate, it could signal a culture of fear or a lack of psychological safety. If communication is light and casual but deadlines are missed, it might point to an overly relaxed or complacent culture.

4. Engage in Honest Conversations: One-on-One Check-Ins

Next, dive deeper into understanding individual experiences. Conduct one-on-one check-ins with team members across all levels—not just your direct reports. The key here is to foster an open environment where employees feel comfortable sharing their real thoughts.

Ask questions like:

• What’s one thing you think our company does really well culturally?
• What’s something that frustrates you about how we work?
• Do you feel comfortable raising concerns, and if not, why?

Encourage honesty, and be ready to listen without getting defensive. If employees perceive you as overly protective of the culture or unwilling to acknowledge flaws, they’re less likely to share real concerns.

5. Evaluate Leadership Alignment: Are You Walking the Talk?

An organisation's culture often reflects its leadership. As CEO, the way you communicate, make decisions, and engage with your team sets the tone for the rest of the company. It's important to evaluate whether your leadership team embodies the culture you want to foster.

Consider this: Are you and your leadership team living the values you expect from the rest of the organisation? If transparency is a core value, are you being open about company performance, even when the news isn’t great? If innovation is key, are you encouraging experimentation and learning from failure?

Leaders who fail to align with the desired culture inadvertently create friction. If there’s a disconnect, it needs to be addressed—not just through words, but through actions. Your team watches you closely; cultural misalignments at the top can quickly trickle down.

6. Analyse Decision-Making and Problem-Solving Processes

Culture often shows up most starkly in moments of decision-making or crisis. Analyse how decisions are made within your organisation:

• Is there a culture of top-down directives, or do employees feel empowered to make decisions?
• How are conflicts resolved? Is it through healthy debate or passive-aggressive behaviour?
• When something goes wrong, is the response one of accountability or blame?

These moments reveal the values that are truly at play, beyond what’s written on the office walls. For instance, if you value collaboration but major decisions are made behind closed doors, you might be fostering an exclusionary culture without realising it.

7. Review Onboarding and Retention Data

Another critical area to assess is the way you onboard new employees and retain talent. Onboarding is a key moment when culture is communicated to new hires. Is your onboarding process structured to impart not just the operational aspects of the job but also the company’s values, mission, and expected behaviours?

Retention data also provides clues about your culture. High turnover, especially within the first six months, might indicate a mismatch between the expectations set during hiring and the reality of working in your company. If exit interviews reveal cultural friction or dissatisfaction, those are issues that need addressing.

8. Take External Perspective into Account: The Customer and Partner Lens

Your organisational culture doesn’t exist in isolation. It influences and is influenced by your relationships with customers, partners, and even investors. Take time to assess how external stakeholders perceive your company.

Ask key clients for feedback:

• What’s their impression of your company’s culture?
• How do they experience your communication and collaboration?

The way you engage externally often reflects internal culture. For instance, a culture that values innovation might show up as a company that’s eager to push boundaries with clients, while a more conservative culture might be more risk-averse in its client relationships.

9. Reassess Regularly and Evolve

Culture is not static, especially in rapidly growing companies. Regular assessment is essential. Set a cadence for reevaluating culture, whether that’s annually, bi-annually, or after key milestones (such as funding rounds or leadership changes).

Use the data collected to identify trends over time. Is culture improving in the areas you’ve targeted for change? Are there new challenges emerging as the company scales?

Most importantly, remember that evolving culture requires deliberate action. Based on your assessments, you may need to implement new processes, change leadership behaviours, or recalibrate your company’s values. This work is ongoing—culture is never “fixed” but constantly shaped by the people and decisions within your organisation.

Final Thoughts: Culture as a Leadership Priority

Assessing and evolving organisational culture is one of the most impactful things you can do as a CEO. It directly influences your company’s ability to attract and retain talent, deliver on its mission, and ultimately scale successfully. As you grow, the culture you nurture today will become the foundation upon which future success is built.

Don’t underestimate the power of culture in shaping your company’s future—make it a leadership priority, and approach it with the same rigour you would any other strategic initiative.