When everyone is moving in the same direction with shared values, organizations become better workplaces and better businesses.
Two companies could have identical business models, similar talent, and the same market opportunities, but one thrives while the other struggles to keep good people and hit its targets.
The difference often comes down to something you can’t see on an organizational chart: cultural alignment. When everyone in your organization understands and lives your company’s values, decisions get made faster, teams collaborate better, and people stick around because they believe in what they’re building together.
It’s more than just a feel-good story. Companies with high-trust cultures are more profitable and have higher stock market returns. Research from FTSE Russell shows that companies on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list outperform the market by a factor of 3.68.
The challenge is that cultural alignment doesn’t happen by accident, and you can’t mandate it through company-wide emails or motivational posters. It requires deliberately measuring where you stand, identifying gaps, and systematically closing them.
Understanding cultural alignment: The foundation of a thriving workplace
Picture a sports team where everyone’s trying to score on their own. Players are ball-hogging, the defense isn’t playing cohesively, and nobody’s communicating. That’s a workplace without cultural alignment.
Now, imagine the same team where everyone knows the game plan, shares the same competitive spirit, and trusts their teammates. That’s cultural alignment in action.
Cultural alignment means everyone in your organization is committed to the same goals and shares the same values — one of the key elements of great company culture.
It’s different from employee engagement — you can have someone who loves their job but still operates like they’re playing for a different team. Engagement is about enthusiasm; alignment is about direction.
When a workforce is culturally aligned, decisions get made faster and teams collaborate better.
Step 1: Define and communicate your core values
What is your company’s purpose? What principles guide your day-to-day actions? How do your employees feel at your organization, and how do you want them to feel? These are the questions that will help as you begin defining your company’s core values.
Once you’ve identified your values, make them crystal clear and actionable. Skip generic words like “excellence” that could apply to any company. Instead, get specific about what these values look like in practice. Rather than “we value teamwork,” try “we win together by having each other’s backs in the good times and the bad.”
You can weave your values into hiring questions, performance reviews, and team meetings. For example, maybe at the start of every all-hands, you share stories about employees who recently embodied these values.
Step 2: Assess current cultural alignment
If your values are your organization’s north star, then tools like employee surveys, focus groups, and one-on-ones are the compass that tells you how to find it.
Ask employees questions like:
- How well do you understand our organization’s core values, and can you describe what they mean in practice?
- In your day-to-day role, how easy or difficult is it to live out our values?
- How consistently do leaders and managers demonstrate our stated values in their actions and decisions?
- When decisions are made, do they feel aligned with our values? Why or why not?
- Do our values make you feel more connected to your team and the organization as a whole?
- How inclusive do you feel our culture is, based on the way our values are practiced?
- Where do you see gaps between our stated values and how we actually operate?
- What is one change you would suggest to better align our daily practices with our values?
By soliciting employee feedback, you can identify not only whether your workforce knows your values, but whether they agree with them in the first place. Employees may identify new values that resonate more deeply with the team. Or they may feel that your company values aren’t being lived by the organization at all.
How to use employee surveys for cultural assessment
Great Place To Work’s employee engagement survey tool can help you access detailed data on the employee experience.
Step 3: Identify gaps and opportunities
Once you have the data, you can analyze the results to identify any misalignments. Pay attention to what leadership thinks is happening versus what employees experience on a daily basis. If multiple people mention that “leadership says one thing but does another,” you’ve found a crack in your foundation.
Pay special attention to disconnects between departments or levels. Maybe your sales team describes company culture completely differently from your engineering team, or managers and frontline employees feel like they’re working for different organizations.
If there are a lot of misalignments, you may not be able to fix them all right away. You could prioritize the most commonly cited issue or the one that’s easiest to fix first. Ideally, your strategy should be a mix of both — what’s most critical and most reasonable to address.
Most importantly, share the results. Don’t quietly try to fix cultural problems behind closed doors. While it might be uncomfortable to admit that your culture isn’t perfect, transparency builds trust.
Here are some tips for how to share employee survey results:
- Have the CEO thank employees for participating and share organization-wide results
- Ask managers to discuss the feedback with their teams and create department-level action plans
- Provide clear next steps on how and when issues will be addressed
- Consider a mix of communications, including town halls, videos, newsletters and emails
Step 4: Develop and implement alignment strategies
It’s not enough to have the culture data — you now need to act on it.
If your company culture is misaligned, you’ll want to work on resetting it. Even if your company culture is quite strong, look for ways to make it even better; otherwise, complacency could eat away at it.
The most successful organizations weave their values into every touchpoint of the employee experience, from the questions they ask in job interviews to how they celebrate wins and handle failures. For example:
- Leadership training and development: Being a great leader is more than just running the organization. It’s also knowing how to connect with your people, which fuels a positive company culture. For example, at Cisco, new and existing leaders are thoroughly trained in how to communicate with their teams and bring out the best in them.
- Onboarding and continuous learning programs: Trust starts with hiring and onboarding by ensuring people feel like a valued member of the team even before they walk through the door. Then, continue to reaffirm their value through employee training and development benefits.
- Recognition and reward systems aligned with core values: Celebrating employees who exemplify your culture demonstrates its importance. At Capital One, “Spot Awards” recognize associates who live the company’s values and go above and beyond in the work they do. Recipients receive points that can be redeemed for gifts, gift cards, or cash paid directly through payroll.
Step 5: Continuously monitor and refine
Your culture will naturally evolve as your company grows, faces new challenges, and brings in fresh perspectives. To maintain alignment, track meaningful indicators like retention rates, promotion rates, and how long it takes for new hires to feel like part of the team.
Note the gaps identified in your employee survey and then compare those results year over year or after you’ve implemented changes from your action plan.
And continue to solicit honest feedback. Not just through annual surveys, but through regular pulse checks, exit interviews, and informal conversations. With a steady feedback loop, you can spot patterns and adjust course as you go, rather than waiting for problems to compound.
The role of leadership in fostering cultural alignment
Cultural alignment starts at the top. When employees see leadership modelling desired behaviors and values, it reinforces that these aren’t just platitudes on a poster — they’re truly at the heart of your organization.
Here are some examples of how great leaders inspire employees:
- Offer leadership training that focuses on how leaders impact people. For example, Mastercard hosts communication workshops focused on building executive presence and authentic connection. Leaders learn how to present powerfully with stories, drive purposeful conversations, and handle tough questions.
- Use storytelling and executive reinforcement. At American Express, leaders frequently share examples of how they’ve pushed back earlier in their careers when a proposed idea or directive didn’t feel right — demonstrating how important it is to speak up.
- Create recognition programs for upholding values. Wegmans runs peer- and manager-nominated awards for employees who demonstrate their values, with a “Superstar Award” for living multiple values. Superstars receive a personalized thank-you letter from their senior vice-president and are celebrated on the intranet and customer social spaces.
Overcoming common challenges in cultural alignment
If you encounter resistance to your company culture, dig deeper to understand the source.
Perhaps employees have seen too many culture initiatives come and go or observed contradictory behavior by leadership — such as a gap between what you say you value and what you actually reward.
For example, you might preach collaboration while your bonus structure rewards individual achievement, or claim to value work-life balance while promoting the people who answer emails at midnight.
Take an honest inventory of your policies, promotions, and recognition systems. If they don't align with your stated values, fix the systems, not the messaging, and address the issue honestly. Start small, prove you mean it through actions, and be patient while trust rebuilds.
The impact of strong cultural alignment: Success stories from top companies
Companies with strong cultural alignment don’t just provide a better employee experience — they also gain competitive advantages like lower turnover and higher customer loyalty.
Here’s how two Best Workplaces™ addressed their issues of cultural misalignment:
Matching actions to your mission: Wellstar’s safety transformation
While the healthcare industry is about caring for others, the irony is that many healthcare employees experience low well-being, burnout from long hours, and hazardous conditions. This was an issue Wellstar Health System noticed, with employees concerned about their physical safety.
Data from their Trust Index™ Survey indicated a misalignment between what Wellstar offers to its clients and how its employees were feeling. In response, the leadership team initiated strategic investments in safety, demonstrating to employees that their concerns had been heard.
By increasing leadership accountability, Wellstar saw lower employee turnover and higher patient satisfaction.
Closing the gap between values and reality: Brains’ community impact focus
At creative agency Brains, 92% of employees say it’s a great place to work, but despite this, the company continuously looks for areas where it can improve the culture. For example, in 2023, it realized that only 72% of employees felt good about the way Brains gave back to the community — one of the lowest scores on its Trust Index survey.
Using insights from the survey, Brains was able to better focus its efforts and explore different ways that employees like to give back, so that the company’s actions better aligned with the team.
The result: a clearer sense of purpose and a 13-point increase in company pride.
Fostering a values-driven culture through alignment
Creating a values-driven culture isn’t about perfect mission statements — it’s about consistent alignment between what you say and what you do. Great workplaces regularly measure their company culture to identify and close those gaps. As a result, they see a better employee experience and higher business performance.
Great Place To Work offers comprehensive tools and resources to help you measure and improve your cultural alignment and gain a distinct competitive advantage.
