By Sally Pritchett
CEO
Explore why workplace culture needs consistent attention and how communication helps turn it into business value
We’ve been certified as a Great Place to Work® for the sixth year running, and it’s a milestone we’re proud of.
Our focus on culture didn’t start six years ago, but Great Place to Work is how we now hold ourselves to account. It gives us independent feedback, benchmarking and a clear view of how our people really experience work.
As our CEO Sally Pritchett puts it in her latest article, culture isn’t created in the easy moments. It’s built when people are under pressure, when things go wrong, when tough decisions need to be made.
What Great Place to Work recognises
Great Place to Work® Certification™ is based entirely on what employees say about their experience. It measures how consistently people experience a high-trust workplace, not what’s written in a strategy or stated in a set of values. It’s a global benchmark, with more than 10,000 organisations across 60 countries applying each year, and it’s not easy to achieve, let alone maintain.
As Sarah Lewis-Kulin, Vice President of Global Recognition at Great Place to Work, puts it: “Great Place To Work Certification is a highly coveted achievement that requires consistent and intentional dedication to the overall employee experience.”
Why culture is a business decision
Maintaining a strong culture takes consistency, ongoing attention and a willingness to tackle the difficult stuff, not just the visible or easy wins. And that’s part of why it too often gets deprioritised. There’s still a tendency in some organisations to treat culture as a “nice to have” and as something that sits alongside the real drivers of performance. The evidence says otherwise.
Research from Great Place to Work shows that:
- 85% of employees in certified organisations report giving extra effort (The Culture Dividend)
- organisations with high-trust cultures are 25% more agile (Great Place to Work Effect)
- 76% of employees in high-trust cultures feel empowered to innovate, compared to just 2% in low-trust environments (Great Place to Work Effect)
- more than 8 in 10 employees in Great Place to Work certified organisations are willing to go above and beyond for their organisation (Great Place to Work Effect)
These aren’t soft outcomes. They are the conditions that drive performance.
When people trust their organisation, they speak up earlier, collaborate better and take ownership of their work. Decisions improve. Problems get solved faster. Innovation becomes part of how work happens, not something talked about in isolation. Culture shows up in results.
Where communication comes in
Culture doesn’t sit in a document or a set of values on a wall. It’s experienced day to day, in how people are spoken to, what they hear from leaders and how consistent that experience feels across the organisation. That’s where communication plays a central role.
Not just in what is said, but in how clearly people understand what’s expected, how connected they feel to the bigger picture and how confident they are to contribute.
The organisations we work with are often dealing with the same challenges:
- change that moves faster than people can absorb
- teams that feel disconnected from strategy
- mixed messages from different parts of the business
- too much communication, not enough cut-through or prioritisation
These aren’t just communication issues, they’re culture issues too. And they have a direct impact on performance.
Turning culture into a business advantage
If there’s one thing this milestone reinforces, it’s that culture and performance are not separate conversations. If you want your people to deliver their best work, adapt to change and stay committed over time, culture needs to be part of your strategy.
And communication is one of the most powerful tools you have to shape that.
If you’re thinking about the culture in your organisation, or where there might be gaps between what’s intended and what’s experienced, we’d love to have that conversation.