The Ultimate Guide to Company Culture in 2025

In today’s competitive business environment, it’s time to rethink everything you know about market advantages. But why?

Well, in case you haven’t noticed, the workforce has changed. Millennials are now middle managers and senior leaders. Generation Z’s much maligned cohort is approaching thirty years old and is in their third or fourth job. No matter how you feel about them – and trust us, there are countless positives – younger people are now an integral part of the workforce, contributing fresh ideas and new perspectives to everything from HR policy to compensation.

However, it is not only millennials and Gen Z who are changing workplace expectations. Many older employees have shifted their priorities since the pandemic. Company car and an annual bonus? No, thank you.

How Can Business Succeed While Balancing Expectations?

In most mid-level careers, culture is more important than infrequent perks. Employees want to feel a greater sense of purpose in their jobs, especially if they aren’t getting rich while they’re at it.

The answer lies to retention in your culture. Nurturing workplace culture is more important than ever.

If you’re struggling to make the connection, let’s take a common scenario facing many managers today: a new hire you’ve been training for the last twelve months has left for an organisation that allows them to work from home or gives them unlimited paid days off.

Sure, there might be a salary bump, but many feel pushed out of jobs by a lack of company culture.

While salary is still an important incentive when hiring, culture is what keeps people from shopping around for other roles. But wait, isn’t “culture” just employee pizza day? No, it’s not. Culture encompasses almost every aspect of your internal business operations. Let’s break it down.

A high-performance culture is built from several essential components. A sense of belonging, psychological respect and healthy communication all play vital roles. As do developmental opportunities, meaningful rewards for hard work and a common goal.

In this ultimate guide to company culture, we will explore three important stages to help you understand and maximise your organisational potential through culture:

1. Why Company Culture is the Key to Success
2. How to Improve Your Company Culture
3. Ways to Maintain Your Positive Company Culture

This guide is designed to be an internal culture audit, and by working through these steps, you will set your organisation up for ongoing business success.

As experts in cultivating positive cultures and improving employee engagement, we have seen up close how easy it is to overlook vital elements of your company’s ethos. But when we get it right, the results are dramatic: up to a 60% increase in employee retention and a significant lift in productivity and engagement scores.

If this guide raises any red flags or you would like support with bringing your people together for success, reach out to our team. Your free consultation will allow you to share current goals and challenges, and we can advise on whether we can improve your culture in as little as six months.

Whether it’s a competitive edge or just peace of mind when planning for the future, Mo engages your employees and helps you build a great place to work.

Part 1: Why Company Culture is the Key to Success

As we’ve already outlined, workplace expectations are changing as younger generations travel up the corporate ladder. They value advancement, yes, but they also want to feel part of something bigger. Core values and a sense of belonging are crucial for millennials, who prefer to work for change within systems, rather than disrupting them. Gen Z are a bit trickier, but anecdotal reports suggest they benefit from firm but compassionate mentorship. Falling back on traditional workplace dynamics and corporate policy is no longer an option for organisations that want to retain this large workforce demographic.

Compounding the issue is a lack of engaged employees at work. As Gallup reports, engagement trends continue to fall across most sectors.

• 23% of employees are engaged.
• 62% of employees are not engaged.
• 15% of employees are actively disengaged.

Is remote work to blame? The picture isn’t clear. While the stagnation in employee engagement is stark, attribution encompasses dozens of workplace trends and geopolitical issues. Rising inflation, social media addiction and a shift towards a better work/life balance have all been blamed for disengaged employees. Whatever the reason, the counterpoint is a sense of accountability across your teams, a feeling cultivated through positive reinforcement and a shared goal.

We’ve seen firsthand the power of a positive company culture in work environments like hospitality, offices, and the energy sector. While these industries face different challenges, all can benefit from smart engagement strategies. How do we know? We helped them achieve it.

How Do We Define a “Positive” Company Culture?

Before exploring ways to recognise and improve workplace culture, we must be able to describe it effectively. Put simply, what do we mean when we say “this company has a great culture”?

Company culture often lives in the eyes of the beholder. For example, a shareholder will prioritise productivity and return, whereas a human resources professional would cite a high retention rate and employee satisfaction as markers of a positive culture. We have spoken to stakeholders at every level of an organisation and have developed our definition as an inclusive description that functions for CEOs and employees alike.

Why have we formed our definition like this? Here’s an essential truth about culture: From the temp to the team leader, you need buy-in from every member of your business to reach your full potential.

Here’s a list of categories that contribute to healthy company culture:

• Values
• Leadership
• Compensation
• Recognition
• Relationships
• Change Management
• Resilience
• Communication

Your culture is an amalgamation of the elements above. They relate to your everyday operations, atmosphere and overarching goals. Every company will prioritise these to differing degrees, but all must be in play to ensure business success.

Ways to Recognise a Positive Company Culture

Struggling to visualise a great place to work? Picture the best workplace you have worked in during your career. What made it special? How did they motivate you? How did they compensate you? Did they deal with layoffs and setbacks empathetically? After observing dozens of cultures, we’ve distilled a positive one into six easy-to-spot characteristics:

1. Feelings of Belonging
2. Psychological Safety
3. Healthy Communication
4. Development Opportunities
5. A Shared Goal
6. Meaningful Rewards

Next time you evaluate your organisational culture, give each of these characteristics a score out of five. To make the experiment even more valuable, ask a selection of employees to grade the company, from new hires to the C-Suite. Be brave; locating issues early will help you resolve them before they fester into a toxic culture.

Why Culture Helps the Bottom Line

Beyond improving retention and cultivating a happier day-to-day employee experience, a positive culture can help steer your whole organisation towards productivity.

But why is engagement specifically important for success? According to McKinsey research, organisations in the top quartile for cultural health deliver a 60% higher shareholder return than median companies.

If that wasn’t convincing enough, companies with great cultures produce 200% higher shareholder returns than those in the bottom quartile.

It’s easy to scoff at employees for asking for softer working conditions, such as “summer Fridays” and remote work, but there are real economic advantages to working with your employees to establish a positive work environment that encourages success. In the next section, we will begin to work through that process together to help improve your company culture.

Part 2: How to Improve Your Company Culture

There are six vital ways to transform your company culture for success in this guide. In each section, we’ll outline ways to recognise whether you are getting them right and how to improve if your culture is falling short.

Here’s a hard truth: Cultural change is easy to initiate but difficult to maintain. If you have tried and failed to initiate change in the past, this is the moment to rethink your approach. The optics of cultural change are important, so consider bringing in a new consultant or software to signal that your latest culture strategy is different.

Bringing Your People Together

It’s easy to spot a disconnected team: work happens in silos; there is little cross-department collaboration; people tend to blame each other for problems, rather than working together to solve them.

Growth is a team game. Investing in interpersonal connection makes a workplace feel more unified. Connection creates strong feelings of loyalty and helps employees feel safe enough to grow and experiment.

Building a connected culture isn’t one person’s job, and buy-in is needed from everyone. But the payoff can be huge – according to Forbes, happy employees are 31% more productive than unhappy ones.

So, how do you bring your teams together? Investing in a specialist platform like Mo helps you build desirable connection by encouraging peer-to-peer recognition.

Our app allows teams to share wins and status updates, helping to break down communication silos that can’t be fixed by platforms like Slack alone.

Mo gives you all the data your team leaders need to make intelligent choices. Our platform integrates easily into your current tech stack, enabling your HR teams to export the data you need for success.

Other ways of bringing people together range from the obvious to the obscure. Team events and holidays are a clear, if expensive, method of building connection across your staff. (Hint: ensure that you’ve considered parental commitments and religious differences when planning social events. Some people choose not to drink alcohol, and it can be expensive to get childcare for a weekend trip.) You could encourage mentorship programs to integrate veteran employees with new hires, which would work regardless of whether you operate in the office or as a remote team.

The best way to create new culture policies is to interview your current and outgoing employees regularly. Not only will feedback make staff feel valued, it will build a high-trust environment.

Developing Psychological Safety

Respect is a vital tenet of a positive culture, but one that is often ignored to chase efficiency and profits. As we’ve outlined, it is economically silly to make employees feel disconnected from their place of work. Bullying, manipulation and insecurity will only drive up dissatisfaction and attrition rates, while plummeting your team productivity.

So, what is the solution? Developing robust, informed HR policies is a great place to start. Go beyond government requirements and take a strong stance against harassment or bullying, especially if there is an unequal power dynamic. The nuances of your policy depend on your company values, but many people who leave jobs do so because of the behaviour of their managing supervisor. Solve this issue, and you’ll drive up retention and avoid possible lawsuits.

Psychological safety can improve the way teams interact and collaborate. It can also help with employee engagement and retention, with Accenture reporting that workplaces with high psychological safety enjoy 76% more engagement and 50% more productivity.

Ways to build psychological safety:

1. Be active listeners.
2. Show empathy and be vulnerable.
3. Make room for everyone’s mistakes.

Values and ethics aren’t just buzzwords. They help your employees want to get up for work in the morning. A great company culture can’t be coerced and building positive HR policies will help get your employees on your side. And that doesn’t mean putting recycling bins in the staff room or sanitary pads in the loos, though that’s a great start.

Building Healthy Communication

Closely related to psychological safety is the need for healthy communication. In times of stress, such as redundancies, staff often feel isolated and confused. That’s why communication plays a key role in company culture.

Unhealthy communication isn’t always easy to spot.

Here are some examples of poor communication:

1. Freezing some employees out of meetings.
2. Sending generic and/or obfuscating emails to the whole team about important changes.
3. Telling two employees different things about a situation.
4. Setting up too many meetings without adjusting workload.
5. Creating a “boys club” during meetings.
6. Talking over colleagues or claiming credit for their contributions.
7. Tolerating and/or giving unwanted or belittling nicknames.
8. Allowing unfair commentary on another employee’s work, personality or performance to go un-challenged.

The list goes on. It is the responsibility of leadership to model positive communication models to their teams, so if you are a leader or HR professional, it’s up to you to make this a priority.

Mo helps leaders equip your teams with employee communication software that encourages positive sharing. Our app is like workplace social media without the negativity. Our platform has been shown to keep teams connected and informed while incentivising teamwork and encouraging ongoing collaboration, whether remotely or in the office.

Offering Development Opportunities

We recently heard a story about an energy consultancy company losing every single one of its mid-senior consultants because their opportunities for advancement were slow and didn’t reward exceptional work. Hierarchical or over-regulated promotion policies are a common problem in the education and government sectors, too.

While meritocratic advancement is the ideal, it’s not always possible for legal or financial reasons. If that is the situation for your organisation, you may benefit from alternative development opportunities for employees.

76% of employees are looking for opportunities to go further in their careers. When you offer learning and development opportunities, your employees will feel like you believe in them, improving accountability and productivity. Professional development proves to employees that their future matters, and will help you retain ambitious, high-performing employees.

Investing in employee development programs will increase your employee value proposition (EVP), helping you attract great candidates to your organisations.

Looking for ideas? Consider mentorship programs, funded courses and skills workshops. If money is tight, we suggest organising a skill-sharing event, where your employees can help each other grow.

Working Towards A Shared Goal

Here’s an interesting stat: Around 70% of Americans connect their sense of self to work. The trend is notably strong amongst millennials, which suggests that building a purpose-driven company can help retain your staff. Even if you aren’t a socially driven or third sector company, you will still benefit from a shared goal.

Innovation? Competitiveness? Efficiency? Sustainability? Creating an attractive set of company values will give you an edge against your competitors and help employees relate their daily work to a bigger cause.

Giving Meaningful Rewards

Data from Gallup indicates that reward and recognition can reduce employee turnover by 24%. And since the cost of replacing an employee is £30,614 on average, the financial benefits of a strategic recognition system are clear.

If you want to harness rewards to improve your company culture, you need to create a dynamic and multi-level strategy. To help you plan your optimal reward strategy, we’ve created a simple cheat sheet to explain different types of staff appreciation:

High Level: Important Milestones

• Less frequent; annual.
• Higher impact.
• Examples: end-of-year celebrations, long service awards.

Mid Level: Positive Feedback

• Regular; monthly.
• Medium impact.
• Examples: employee of the month, end-of-quarter bonus.

Base Level: Daily Habits

• Highly frequent; daily or weekly.
• Steady impact.
• Examples: weekly wins; peer-to-peer recognition.

The type of rewards you choose to distribute is dependent on your budget, country and HR policies. We suggest mixing instant cash rewards with larger bonuses to incentivise success.

Part 3: Ways to Maintain Your Positive Company Culture

If you have reached this part of the guide, you will have considered all the ways you need to improve your culture. Now, we need techniques to maintain it.

A great company culture is hard to replicate, which is why you should invest in its maintenance. Competitors can copy your product or marketing strategy, but they will encounter problems down the road if they suffer from high staff turnover. That’s why continuous investment in your company culture is economically sound.

In this section, we’ll look at three ways to ensure that your culture continues to thrive. These ideas are not exhaustive, so take note of all the culture initiatives that worked for you during your company’s transformation and schedule refreshers throughout the year. This relatively easy exercise will ensure that your strategy is personalised and effective.

Alternatively, you can work with a culture consultancy firm or employ a culture expert as part of your in-house team.

Develop Effective Feedback Loops

The best way to stay on top of your company culture is to be aware of problems before they come entrenched. Feedback loops are the best way to detect toxic habits. If you have truly invested in positive communication and healthy boundaries, this monitoring should be easy.

While employee engagement surveys are a popular way to gauge sentiments across your teams, they are both expensive and infrequent. We have solved this problem by creating a platform that facilitates daily or weekly feedback loops.

Mo uses a centralised feed and automated prompts called Boosts to engage employees without adding to HR or manager workload. We integrate with your HRIS and tech stack to make the process easy.

You can create whatever Boosts you want, making it easy for employees to share feedback and offer suggestions.

Hold Leadership Accountable

Strong leadership is vital if you want to build a culture of accountability. A study by Partners in Leadership found that 84% of employees felt that the way leaders behave is the single most important factor influencing accountability in their organisations.

To achieve long term cultural change, everyone from your middle managers to the C-Suite must role model your policies. If employees feel like they are being subjected to different standards when it comes to communication, respect and recognition, they will disengage. 

Get leadership buy-in before you demand higher standards from your employees on the lowest rung. You may get different compensation, but culture is about believing that you’re all in this together. Hypocrisy is not a good look – and it may even end up on social media.

Pay Attention to Warning Signs

What do we mean when we say “cultural warning signs”? Here are some examples that we’ve observed in struggling organisations that you would do well to be vigilant of:

1. Rising attrition levels.
2. Low uptake of social activities or initiatives.
3. Communication silos, such as isolating working.
4. Abrasive cross-department collaboration.
5. Blaming, conflict and/or avoiding responsibility.
6. Employees keeping their camera off during meetings.
7. Consistently missing targets.
8. Resentment towards senior leadership.
9. Harassment complaints and/or cover-ups.

This list of warning signs is far from exhaustive, but it should give you a sense of awareness in your company.

If you see one or more of these toxic traits, stay calm. Identify whether it could be solved through an HR or managerial intervention and address it by searching for the best outcome for everyone involved. Try to avoid reprimanding unless it is an issue of harassment or bullying.

Expand the conversation, rather than close it down. Most people are not malicious but merely have unmet needs. As a leader in your company, you and your colleagues must take responsibility to address it.

Mo Helps Build Great Company Culture

Mo is an employee culture platform that can help leaders improve collaboration and morale, reduce employee churn and drive change.

Our platform creates a vibrant culture by developing team habits, encouraging people to celebrate success, recognise results and appreciate colleagues. Your complete toolkit for connecting and motivating teams in the new world of work.

We work with dozens of different industries and sectors to deliver results for their company culture.

For example, we have strategies to support part-time teams and shift workers. Casual staff, such as hospitality workers, often have a higher turnover rate because they don’t feel connected to their team. A sense of belonging and accountability will motivate them to work harder and stay longer. Mo brings casual staff together on one culture platform, making workers feel appreciated when it matters most.

In corporate cultures, we can spot weaknesses and help boost your culture for success. Data indicates that 82% of managers end up in the position “accidentally”, while one in four employees have left a job because of a negative relationship with their manager.

Transform your culture with Mo

Book a free demo to learn how Mo can help you:

• 🤝 Improve employee engagement scores
• 🚀 Reduce employee churn
• 😍 Build a collaborative culture

Book your free demo

Our award-winning platform is designed to help busy managers engage their teams. It doesn’t matter if your people are in-office, hybrid or remote.

A great company culture is within reach. With the right strategy and investment, your organisation can find a market advantage, retain employees and soar where others flounder in the new world of work. If you have any questions about your culture, or anything covered in this guide, reach out to our team.