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Is your culture out of step? Why now is the time for a culture audit

Writer: Craig Richards
Craig Richards
2 hours ago
7 min read
Culture isn't a vibe. It's infrastructure. Every organisation get a culture audit eventually. The only question is who does it.
Culture isn't a vibe. It's infrastructure. Every organisation get a culture audit eventually. The only question is who does it.

Most organisations only find out what their culture is really like when someone else tells them. A tribunal. A whistleblower. A journalist. An independent review with the organisation's name in the headline.


By then, the culture has usually been out of step for years. A culture audit is how you find out first - while you can still fix it on your own terms.


What is a culture audit?

A culture audit is an independent, structured look at how an organisation really works. Not what the values poster says, but how people behave, what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, and what people feel able to say. It compares the culture leaders believe they have with the one their people experience.


The organisational psychologist Edgar Schein described culture in three layers: the things you can see (offices, processes, dress codes), the values an organisation says it holds, and underneath them the shared assumptions people act on without thinking. Most organisations measure the top two layers. The problems almost always sit in the third.


Why culture falls out of step

In 1922 the sociologist William Ogburn coined the term "cultural lag": the gap that opens when one part of society changes faster than another. Technology and the world around us move quickly. Values, habits and rules move slowly.


Organisations live in that gap. The world changes - who we employ, what the public expects, how work gets done, what the law requires - but structures, systems and unwritten rules stay as they were. Nobody decides to fall behind. It happens a little at a time.


Policing in England and Wales is a stark example. The government's own white paper, published in January 2026, describes the 43-force model as "nearly unchanged in 60 years" and "no longer fit for purpose". It was built for a world of local, physical crime. Today fraud is the largest single crime type, and over 90% of crime is estimated to have a digital element. Local IT systems still sit in silos and cannot easily share information. Over roughly the same period, public trust in the police fell from 80% to 71% in under a decade.


Structures and systems are not culture on their own, but they shape it. Culture isn't a vibe - it's infrastructure. When the way an organisation is built no longer matches the world it serves, people find workarounds, standards drift, and the gap between what the public expects and what it gets keeps growing.


What happens when no one looks

This is not about one sector. The same pattern shows up again and again in independent reviews:

  • London Fire Brigade (2022). Nazir Afzal's review found the Brigade "institutionally misogynist and racist". Staff told the review that "complaints go nowhere".

  • East Kent maternity services (2022). Dr Bill Kirkup's investigation found "gross failures of teamworking", "a culture of denial" and a trust that put reputation ahead of openness with families. It identified eight missed opportunities to act, going back to 2010.

  • The CBI (2023). After allegations of sexual misconduct, its president admitted the organisation had been "complacent" and had "failed to filter out culturally toxic people". Major members cut ties within weeks.

In each case the warning signs were there. They were not seen, or not acted on, and the human and reputational cost was enormous.


The sociologist Diane Vaughan has a name for how this happens. Studying the 1986 Challenger disaster, she described the "normalisation of deviance": small departures from standards are tolerated, nothing goes wrong, and gradually the departure becomes the new normal. From the inside, it does not look like a problem. That is exactly why you need someone looking from the outside.


What happens when you do look

It does not have to end in an inquiry. In 2019, one of our clients - a multinational logistics business with 85,000 people across 40 countries - found itself badly out of step. After a major restructure, teams were unsure what was expected of them. Reports of inappropriate behaviour were widespread, 87% of senior leaders were men, and psychological safety scored just 2.3 out of 10. At the same time, its own customers had started asking for evidence of inclusion in tenders. Society had moved, and the market had moved with it.


Rather than wait for a crisis, the business faced the evidence and changed the systems that shaped its culture: a new code of conduct and speak-up process, leadership competencies that included inclusion, and bonuses that counted team culture scores. Five years on, engagement had risen from 58% to 78%, inappropriate behaviour cases had halved, employment tribunals were down 60% and sickness absence had fallen from 8.2% to 5.7%. The business also won 15 major contracts that specifically cited its culture credentials.


Same starting point as the headline cases. Very different ending - because someone chose to look.


When should you do a culture audit?

There is no bad time to understand your culture, but some moments matter more than others:

  • A new leader arrives. The first 100 days are the best chance to see the culture clearly, before you become part of it.

  • A merger, acquisition or restructure. Two cultures are coming together, or one is being reshaped. Find the friction before it finds you.

  • A strategic pivot or a plateau. A new strategy the culture has to deliver, or growth that has stalled and no one is quite sure why.

  • The signals start to shift. Rising grievances, sickness or turnover, falling engagement scores, exit interviews that all say the same thing.

  • Before or after a deal. Investors increasingly want to know whether culture will help or hinder the value they plan to create.

  • When the rules change. New legal and regulatory duties ask you to show that your culture works, not just that you have a policy.


How should a culture audit be done?

A good culture audit is more than a staff survey with a new name. In my experience it needs five things:

  1. Independence. People will tell an outsider things they will not tell their manager, and an outsider sees what insiders have learned to stop noticing.

  2. More than one source. Surveys show the scale. Interviews and focus groups explain the why. Data on grievances, turnover and progression shows what is actually happening. Policies and processes show what is supposed to happen.

  3. Safety to speak. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety shows people only raise problems when they believe it is safe to. Anonymity and confidentiality are not a nice-to-have - they are what make the findings true.

  4. A focus on the gap. Chris Argyris called it the difference between "espoused theory" and "theory-in-use": what we say we do, and what we actually do. That gap is where the risk sits.

  5. Findings leaders can act on. A clear picture of strengths and risks, in priority order, with practical recommendations - not a 200-page report that sits on a shelf.


That is how we built the EA Culture Audit. It draws on three sources of evidence - what the organisation says, what the data shows and what people experience - across ten focus areas, from strategic alignment and decision making to psychological safety and voice. People are interviewed once, in one rich conversation. Every finding is backed by observational, documentary and testimonial evidence, with a confidence level and a full chain of evidence. Along the way we test for patterns such as "values as wallpaper", where collaboration is praised but solo performers advance faster, and "filtered bad news", where problems are softened on the way up until they become crises.


Why now?

Three things make this the right moment.


The world of work is still changing. Six years on from the pandemic, most organisations are still working out hybrid working, new technology and AI, and a workforce whose expectations have moved faster than many cultures have. That is cultural lag happening in real time.


The law now asks you to show it. Since 30 October 2026, employers must take "all reasonable steps" to prevent sexual harassment, and can be liable for harassment of their staff by third parties such as clients and customers. In financial services, the FCA's rules on non-financial misconduct, including bullying and harassment, took effect on 1 September 2026. A policy on the intranet is not evidence of reasonable steps. Knowing your culture, and acting on what you find, is much closer.


Trust is fragile. Public confidence in institutions has been knocked repeatedly, and employees and customers are quicker than ever to call out a gap between what an organisation says and what it does.


The real question

Every organisation has a culture audit eventually. The only question is who does it - you, on your own terms, or a tribunal, a regulator or an independent inquiry after something has gone wrong.


The organisations named here have since worked to change. But every one of those reviews came after the damage was done. If you want to know whether your culture is in step with the world it serves, the best time to look is before anyone else does.


If you would like to talk about a culture audit for your organisation, get in touch: https://www.ea-consulting.group/#contact


Frequently asked questions

What is a culture audit? An independent assessment of how an organisation's culture works in practice - the behaviours, norms and unwritten rules - compared with its stated values and policies.


What is the difference between a culture audit and an engagement survey? An engagement survey measures how people feel at a point in time. A culture audit explains why, draws on several sources of evidence, and tests whether policies and processes actually work in practice.


What does a culture audit look at? A good audit looks at culture as a system, not a mood. That means strategy and values, people data, how information flows, who gets rewarded and promoted, how decisions are really made, how the leadership team works together, whether people feel safe to speak up, what they are proud of, and whether the organisation is ready for what comes next.


Can a culture audit help with the duty to prevent sexual harassment? It can form part of how you show you have taken reasonable steps, by identifying risks early and recording what you did about them. It is not a substitute for legal advice on your obligations.


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