Work used to be simpler. Clock in, do the job, head home. Maybe there was a suggestion box. The company’s work culture, if it was mentioned at all, lived in a laminated set of “values” that most people forgot by lunch. That version of the work doesn’t exist anymore.
The past five years have changed everything—quietly at first, then all at once. A global pandemic. The shift to remote and hybrid working. A mass reassessment of priorities. Words like “burnout,” “belonging,” and “toxic” became part of the work lexicon—not in theory, but in lived experience.
This wasn’t just a change in workplace trends. It was a cultural reckoning. People no longer tolerate workplaces that drain them. They’re leaving, speaking up, switching industries altogether. And organisations are being forced to answer questions that were once easy to ignore:
- Why are people disengaged?
- Why are good employees leaving?
- What are we doing about it?
For the first time in years, company culture isn’t being discussed behind closed HR doors, it’s being recognised as the foundation of everything else. Not just a “nice to have,” but a business imperative. This is the moment many companies are realising: work culture isn’t the soft stuff. It’s the smart stuff.
TL;DR – What Is Culture Elevate?
Culture Elevate is a research-backed company culture solution by Culture Smart that helps organisations measure, understand, and improve workplace culture. It combines two validated tools, Culture Scan and Engage360, to assess values alignment, leadership behaviour, and employee engagement.
What It Delivers:
- Data-led diagnostics with expert interpretation.
- Custom interventions, built for long-term change.
- Culture tracking over time, not just a one-off survey.
Together, they form a practical, evidence-based framework for building a better culture with clarity and confidence.
The Business Case for Company Culture Solutions: What the Data Tells Us
Over the past five years, a growing body of research has painted a stark picture of workplace culture across, and the numbers are hard to ignore.
According to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace Report, only 13% of employees in Europe are engaged in their work—the lowest figure of any global region. Disengagement, Gallup warns, is no longer a minor issue. It now costs businesses an estimated $8.8 trillion globally, nearly 9% of worldwide GDP.
But it’s not just about lost productivity. The human cost is equally high.
In a 2022 MIT Sloan Management Review analysis of over 1.4 million employee reviews on Glassdoor, researchers found that a toxic work culture was the strongest predictor of attrition during the Great Resignation. In fact, it was over 10.4 times more likely to drive resignations than compensation.
These findings point to a common thread: organisational culture is no longer just a morale issue, it’s a material risk. When culture goes unexamined or unaddressed, the consequences show up in absenteeism, poor performance, turnover, and brand reputation.
As a result, more organisations are turning to structured, data-informed company culture solutions. These solutions aren’t simply engagement surveys or generic training programmes, they’re comprehensive frameworks that combine diagnostics, analytics, and leadership interventions to create real change.
And crucially, they’re being adopted at the top.
In Heidrick & Struggles’ 2023 CEO survey, which included over 500 business leaders, 83% said they were actively engaged in cultural transformation efforts. More than half (59%) described culture as a strategic business priority, and a third ranked it as the number one driver of financial performance, up from just 7% two years earlier.
This shift in mindset is reshaping how culture is viewed across industries. No longer relegated to the HR function, culture is increasingly treated as core infrastructure, something to be measured, managed, and matured over time.
It’s within this context that modern company culture solutions have emerged, not as quick fixes, but as serious, evidence-based tools to reduce risk, improve retention, and future-proof the organisation.
Introducing Culture Elevate: A Scalable Company Culture Solution
As organisations increasingly prioritise cultural transformation, the demand for structured, evidence-based solutions has surged. Culture Smart developed Culture Elevate in response to that demand, a company culture solution that is as strategic as it is human.
Unlike one-off workshops or employee sentiment tools that offer surface-level snapshots, Culture Elevate is a modular, end-to-end platform that combines data-driven diagnostics with guided organisational interventions. It’s designed not only to reveal cultural patterns but also to shift them—intentionally, sustainably, and at scale.
What Culture Elevate Offers
At its core, Culture Elevate rests on two integrated pillars: diagnosis and intervention.
🔍 Step 1: Diagnose – Understand the Company Culture That Exists
Before any change can begin, organisations must understand the culture they already have. Culture Elevate offers two validated tools for this purpose:
Culture Scan
- Measures the alignment between organisational values, leadership behaviour, and employee perception.
- Uses semantic differential questions to map discrepancies and surface cultural tensions.
- Offers both organisational and subgroup-level insights to highlight where alignment is strongest and weakest.
Engage360
- Captures detailed data on employee sentiment and satisfaction.
- Tracks engagement across multiple dimensions, including trust, motivation, communication, and psychological safety.
- Enables segmentation by function, level, location, and tenure to reveal nuanced patterns.
Together, these tools create a cultural fingerprint of the organisation, quantifying what is often considered intangible. This diagnostic process typically takes two weeks, including setup, survey completion, and analysis.
💬 Step 2: Intervene – Turn Insight into Action
The real work begins after diagnosis. Culture Smart’s team of experts supports leaders in interpreting the data and developing targeted culture strategies.
This includes:
- Report walkthrough sessions with leadership teams.
- Custom intervention planning based on the diagnostic results.
- Executive coaching and workshops to support behaviour change at the top.
- Long-term tracking and follow-up surveys to measure impact and momentum.
Unlike culture audits that produce static reports, Culture Elevate is built for continuous cultural development. It becomes a working tool, not a once-a-year event.
Why It Works: Scientific Rigour and Practical Simplicity
Both tools in Culture Elevate, Culture Scan and Engage360, undergo rigorous psychometric validation. This ensures that results are not only consistent and credible but also grounded in established scientific methods.
| Metric | Culture Scan | Engage360 |
| Reliability (Cronbach Alpha) | 0.94 – Very strong internal consistency | 0.81 – Strong internal consistency |
| Validation Method | Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) | Convergent & Discriminant Validity |
| Comparative Fit Index (CFI) | 0.915 – Excellent model fit | Not applicable |
| Root Mean Square Error of Approximation | 0.044 – Excellent model fit | Not applicable |
| Significance Level (p-value) | Not applicable | All correlations significant at p < 0.001 |
What These Metrics Mean
- Cronbach’s Alpha: A measure of reliability; values above 0.8 indicate strong internal consistency.
- CFI (Comparative Fit Index): Indicates how well the model fits the data; values above 0.90 are considered very good.
- RMSEA (Root Mean Square Error of Approximation): Assesses the error of approximation in the model; values below 0.05 suggest a close fit.
- SEM (Structural Equation Modelling): A statistical method used to assess the relationships between observed and latent variables.
- Convergent & Discriminant Validity: Demonstrates that survey items measure the intended concepts, and not unrelated ones.
Together, these metrics confirm that Culture Elevate’s assessments are both statistically valid and practically useful, capable of guiding real decisions with confidence.
What Makes Culture Elevate Different (And Why It Works)
There’s no shortage of tools promising to fix company culture. Most sound good on paper. Some even come with sleek dashboards and colourful reports. But scratch beneath the surface, and what often emerges is either too generic to be useful, or too shallow to spark meaningful change.
Culture Elevate was built to be different.
It doesn’t stop at telling leaders there’s a problem. It helps them understand why the problem exists, where it’s showing up, and what can realistically be done about it.
Here’s how it stands apart from other company culture solutions:
Designed for Ongoing Culture Work, Not Just a One-Off Survey
Most culture efforts fail because they’re treated like events—a single intervention, a pulse survey, maybe a workshop or two. Then back to business as usual.
Culture Elevate doesn’t work like that. It’s built for continuity. From initial diagnostics through to tailored action plans and follow-up assessments, it supports organisations through every stage of their culture work. Because real culture change happens over time, not over lunch.
Insight Is Always Paired with Interpretation
The tools are scientifically sound. The data is statistically valid. But what makes them powerful is the process that follows.
After the results are in, Culture Smart’s team works directly with leaders to unpack what the numbers are saying—and what they’re not. This isn’t about performance theatre or finding someone to blame. It’s about honest conversations that lead to better decisions.
The Interventions Aren’t Pre-Packaged
Every workplace is different. A culture issue in a multinational logistics company won’t look the same as one in a regional healthcare trust. That’s why Culture Elevate doesn’t offer pre-written action plans.
What it does offer is something better: expert-supported planning that responds to the organisation’s unique context. Whether it’s trust issues, burnout, communication breakdowns or leadership gaps—Culture Elevate helps teams build interventions that actually match the reality on the ground.
Two Tools, One Story
Culture Scan provides a clear view of how the organisation sees itself: its values, its behaviours, its alignment (or lack of it). Engage360 reveals how people feel showing up to that culture every day: what energises them, what erodes them, and what needs attention.
Used together, they tell a story that leadership can actually use. No guesswork, no abstract theorising, just clear, grounded insight.
It’s Built for Humans, Not Just HR
Culture work only sticks if people feel safe enough to engage with it. That’s why everything in Culture Elevate, from how questions are worded, to how results are shared, is designed with care.
There’s no jargon for the sake of it. No complicated scoring models hidden behind a paywall. Just meaningful, accessible information that helps people understand themselves, their teams, and their workplace.
Because in the end, culture is about people. And people deserve tools that take them seriously.
The Moment for Cultural Clarity
Across industries, across countries, across company sizes—there’s a common thread emerging. Culture is no longer seen as a soft topic or a branding exercise. It’s being treated, increasingly, as infrastructure. As risk management. As the foundation of retention, leadership, trust, and growth.
The stories vary, but the signs are consistent: low engagement, high turnover, talent walking away not because the work was hard but because the culture made it harder.
There’s no universal playbook for fixing culture. But there are better ways to approach it with honesty, with structure, and with tools that are built to surface what’s really going on.
That’s what Culture Elevate was designed for.
Not to promise perfection, but to offer something that’s been missing from many organisations for too long: cultural clarity. The kind that allows companies to act early, lead better, and build workplaces people want to be part of.
Explore What’s Possible
If your organisation is ready to move from reacting to culture problems to designing a better workplace, intentionally, and with evidence, Culture Elevate is here to help.
→ Learn more about how this company culture solution works
→ Dive into the diagnostic tools: Culture Scan for organisational values and alignment, and Engage360 for employee engagement and sentiment
→ Or simply start a conversation through our Contact Us page
And if you’re curious about the team behind Culture Smart and the thinking that shapes our work, the About Us page is a good place to start.
Because company culture doesn’t shift by accident. But it can shift with the right support.
A company work culture solution is a structured approach to understanding, assessing, and improving the behaviours, values, and workplace experiences that define an organisation. These solutions go beyond employee perks and policies, they focus on the systems and signals that shape how work gets done.
Work culture directly affects employee engagement, retention, innovation, and trust. Poor culture leads to high turnover and low morale. A strong, aligned culture improves collaboration, agility, and long-term success.
Most culture surveys measure employee sentiment once a year. Culture Elevate combines validated diagnostics with tailored interventions and ongoing support. It doesn’t just collect data—it helps leaders act on it.
Culture Elevate includes two integrated tools:
Culture Scan: Measures alignment between leadership behaviour, values, and employee perception.
Engage360: Tracks how employees feel about their experience at work, across multiple dimensions like trust and motivation.
Targeted Interventions: Based on diagnostic findings, Culture Elevate provides tailored guidance, such as leadership coaching, communication strategies, and culture-aligned action plans to help organisations not only understand their culture, but improve it.
Any organisation experiencing challenges with engagement, retention, trust, or leadership effectiveness. It’s particularly valuable for teams going through change, growth, or strategic transformation.
The initial diagnostics typically take two weeks. From there, intervention planning, coaching, and follow-up are tailored to the organisation’s pace and context.
All responses in Culture Scan and Engage360 are anonymous and aggregated. Individual feedback is never attributed to specific employees. This ensures psychological safety and encourages honest input.
Not at all. It’s designed to scale, small, mid-sized, and large organisations can all benefit. The modular format means it can be tailored to different team sizes and industries.
