10 Ways to Build a Stronger Workplace Culture
What Is Workplace Culture?
Workplace culture is the lived experience of working somewhere. It's not the values on the website or the perks in the benefits guide. It's whether people speak up in meetings or stay quiet. Whether a new employee feels welcomed or overlooked. Whether your managers build their teams up or wear them down. Culture is what actually happens, and it has a direct impact on performance, retention, and whether your organization can attract the kind of people who have options.
What You'll Learn in This Post
10 specific, research-backed practices that build stronger teams and more engaged workplaces
How to support your people through AI-driven change without losing their trust
What the data says about manager impact, psychological safety, engagement, and inclusion
Concrete next steps you can bring back to your team this week
If you've been in HR or people leadership for any amount of time, you already know that culture isn't a program. It's not something you launch in Q1 and measure in Q4. It's the accumulation of thousands of small decisions like how a manager handles a hard conversation, whether feedback actually lands, or whether someone new to the team feels like they belong by the end of their first month.
What's changed in 2026 is the speed of the external pressure bearing down on that culture. AI is reshaping roles and skill requirements faster than most organizations have historically been able to respond. Research from Jobs for the Future found that nearly half of all workers already know they need new skills because of AI, and most say their employer isn't helping them get there. That gap is a culture problem as much as a learning problem.
The good news is that culture is something you can actually work on. Here are 10 ways to do it.
Why Culture Is a Competitive Advantage Right Now
Culture has always influenced whether people stay or leave, whether they give full effort or minimum effort. What's different now is how measurable that impact has become.
Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that highly engaged teams outperform low-engagement teams by 23% in profitability and 18% in productivity. That performance gap isn't explained by who got hired. It's explained by the environment people are working in. Culture is the environment.
For HR leaders right now, the opportunity is significant. JFF's 2026 workforce research found that only one-third of workers feel their employer is adequately preparing them for AI-driven change. The organizations that step into that gap will get more out of their AI investments too. Tools only deliver value when the people using them are engaged, willing to experiment, and honest about what's working.
10 Ways to Improve Workplace Culture When AI Is Changing Everything
1. Be Honest With Your People About AI
Your employees are already forming opinions about what AI means for their jobs. They're reading the headlines, watching what's happening at other companies, and drawing their own conclusions. What they want from you is a straight answer. What's changing, what support is available, and where things actually stand.
A 2026 JFF survey found that only one-third of workers say their employer is giving them what they need to navigate AI effectively. Leaders who get ahead of that gap earn real credibility. The ones who stay silent or vague leave their people to fill in the blanks themselves and the stories people tell themselves are rarely reassuring.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture:
Hold dedicated conversations about how AI is being adopted in your organization, what it means for different roles, and what support is available
Be specific. Employees handle change far better when they know what's actually happening than when they're left to fill in the blanks
Create space for questions, including the uncomfortable ones. Leaders who welcome hard questions build far more trust than those who deflect them
2. Invest in Your People's Growth
JFF's 2026 research found that 47% of workers already recognize they need new skills because of AI. 29% say they need them within the next year. Most of them are waiting for their employer to help. The organizations that move first on this build something more durable than any single training program: a reputation as a place that invests in its people.
That reputation is a retention tool. People who feel genuinely supported in growing their skills are far less likely to look elsewhere, even when recruiters come calling.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture:
Run a skills gap assessment by role. What does each person need to stay relevant in the next 18 months?
Connect learning to real career progression. On-demand eLearning works best when employees can see where it leads
3. Lead with Empathy During Times of Change
There's a version of change management that goes straight from announcement to action plan. It's efficient. It also misses a step that determines whether people actually come with you.
When people are navigating uncertainty — whether that's a technology shift, a restructuring, or a change in strategy — they need to feel acknowledged before they can engage productively. The APA's 2025 Work in America report found that 54% of U.S. workers say job insecurity is having a significant impact on their stress. Managers who create space for that before moving into execution build teams that are more resilient, more candid, and more willing to go the extra mile when it actually matters.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture:
Acknowledge what people are experiencing. "This has been a period of real change" is a sentence that builds more trust than any polished update memo
Equip managers to hold these conversations well. Most want to, they just need the language and the confidence to do it
Sequence matters: when rolling out new changes, lead with acknowledgment before moving to expectations
4. Communicate With Consistency and Transparency
Most trust problems in organizations aren't caused by bad news. They're caused by silence, mixed messages, and the sense that leadership knows more than it's saying. When employees feel like they're being managed around the truth, they stop trusting even the communications that are genuine.
Glassdoor's 2026 Worklife Trends Report found that employee mentions of "misalignment" and "distrust" in leadership reviews jumped sharply in 2024. In most cases, those words don't describe a single bad decision. They describe a pattern of feeling uninformed. A consistent communication cadence, even when there isn't big news to share, goes a long way toward closing that gap.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture:
Establish a regular cadence: weekly team check-ins, monthly leadership updates, quarterly open Q&A. Pick a rhythm and protect it
Say what you know. Name what you don’t. Commit to follow-up on both. Three sentences of honest uncertainty beat a polished non-answer every time
For high-stakes messages, get off email. A five-minute video or live conversation carries trust that a carefully worded memo never will
5. Build Psychological Safety Into How Your Teams Operate
Google's Project Aristotle studied hundreds of Google teams over several years trying to understand what made some dramatically more effective than others. The answer wasn't seniority, credentials, or how often people socialized. It was psychological safety. Psychological safety refers to whether team members felt safe enough to take risks, speak up, and be wrong in front of each other.
This matters practically, not just philosophically. Forrester found that only 16% of workers had high AI readiness. This is largely because people were figuring out new tools on their own rather than asking for help. Teams where people feel safe asking questions adopt new ways of working faster, surface problems earlier, and recover from mistakes more quickly.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture:
When someone brings bad news, respond with questions before conclusions. “Tell me more” is more powerful than most leaders realize
Celebrate the people who flagged problems early. If the only people who get recognized are the ones who “solved” the crisis, you’ve trained your team to stay quiet
Leaders who model vulnerability create cultures where others feel safe doing the same. Admitting what you got wrong isn’t weakness; it’s the fastest way to earn trust
6. Invest in Your Managers
Talk to almost any employee about why they left a job, and eventually the conversation comes around to their manager. Not the company, not the industry, not the workload. The manager. How they gave feedback, whether they showed up for their team, and whether people felt valued or invisible.
Gallup's 2025 research found that managers account for about 70% of the variance in team engagement. It also found that only 44% of managers worldwide have ever received any formal management training. Those two data points together tell you a lot about where most culture investment is and isn't going.
The skills that make someone a great individual contributor are almost entirely different from the skills that make someone a great manager. If your organization isn't actively developing those skills, you're essentially hoping people figure it out on their own.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture:
Map your management layer honestly. Who on your team is building culture? Who is quietly draining it?
Invest in real management training. Skills like giving feedback, running inclusive meetings, and de-escalating conflict take practice
Stop promoting people into management based on technical performance alone. Being good at the job doesn’t make someone good at leading people
Hold managers accountable for culture outcomes, not just output metrics. If your performance reviews only measure results, that’s exactly what you’ll get
7. Make Civility a Practiced Skill
Most organizations say they value respect. Fewer have actually defined what respectful behavior looks like in practice, and fewer still have equipped people with the skills to maintain it when things get tense.
Civility matters because it's the baseline everything else rests on. Inclusion, psychological safety, effective feedback — none of those function well in an environment where people feel dismissed, interrupted, or talked over. And unlike most culture challenges, civility is highly teachable. When people have the language and the skills to navigate difficult interactions, they use them.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture
Define what respectful behavior looks like in your organization specifically. "Be respectful" is a value. "Let people finish their thoughts before responding" is a skill
Give people the language and confidence to address disrespect in the moment, not just the permission to report it after the fact
Train for civility proactively, before there’s a problem. It’s far more effective than a reactive response to something that’s already gone wrong
8. Measure Your Culture
Most organizations have a sense of what their culture is like. Far fewer have actual data. The problem with relying on instinct is that leaders tend to be the last to know when things are going sideways. It’s partly because people manage up, and partly because the warning signs show up in behaviors, not reports.
Gallup's 2025 research found that highly engaged teams outperform disengaged teams by 23% in profitability. If you don't know where your organization lands on that spectrum, you're making culture decisions without the information you need to make them well.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture:
Start with a free pulse check. CultureAlly’s Culture Compass Quiz takes minutes and gives you a real picture of where your culture stands today
Share what you find with your team. Transparency about the results builds more trust in the process than keeping them internal
9. Practice Inclusion Every Day
The organizations where people genuinely feel like they belong have figured out that inclusion is a daily practice. It lives in meeting norms, in who gets credit for ideas, in who gets assigned to high-visibility projects, and in whether feedback is given equitably.
JFF's 2026 research found that workers of color are disproportionately likely to feel the career impact of AI, with 38% planning to change their career pathway because of it compared to 23% of workers overall. How your organization rolls out AI tools, who gets trained first, and who gets left behind are inclusion decisions — whether you frame them that way or not.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture:
Look at your meeting norms. Whose voices consistently dominate? Whose ideas get picked up only after someone else repeats them?
Weave inclusion skills into management training as a practical, daily discipline rather than a standalone module
Check who has access to AI tools and upskilling programs. Equity gaps in learning access compound quickly
10. Track Culture Like the Business Outcome It Is
Culture is often treated as a soft topic until it shows up in hard numbers — turnover, absenteeism, a decline in engagement scores, an exit interview that says the same thing for the fifth time in a row. By then, it's already a problem.
The organizations with the strongest cultures tend to measure them early and often. Glassdoor's 2026 Worklife Trends Report found that employee trust in senior leadership reached a notable low point in early 2024. A trend that had been building for over a year before most organizations caught it. Pulse surveys, stay interviews, and regular manager feedback loops catch things that annual surveys miss entirely.
What to Do to Improve Workplace Culture:
Add culture metrics to your leadership dashboard alongside output metrics. Engagement, psychological safety, inclusion, and trust should have owners and targets
Track culture data over time, not just in annual surveys. Pulse checks, stay interviews, and manager feedback loops give you a much earlier signal
When the data tells you something, act on it visibly. Employees who see their feedback lead to real change are far more likely to give it honestly next time
Quick Reference: 10 Ways to Improve Workplace Culture
| # | Strategy | Key Focus |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Be Honest With Your People About AI | Transparency builds trust — silence fills the gap with anxiety |
| 2 | Invest in Your People's Growth | Proactive skill investment signals people matter |
| 3 | Lead with Empathy During Times of Change | Acknowledgment before expectations |
| 4 | Communicate With Consistency and Transparency | Regularity and honesty over polish |
| 5 | Build Psychological Safety Into How Your Teams Operate | The foundation for performance, innovation, and trust |
| 6 | Invest in Your Managers | Managers drive 70% of team engagement — train them accordingly |
| 7 | Make Civility a Practiced Skill | Define specific behaviors, then build the skills to sustain them |
| 8 | Measure Your Culture | Data over assumptions — baseline first, then improve |
| 9 | Practice Inclusion Every Day | Belonging is built in ordinary moments, not annual programs |
| 10 | Track Culture Like the Business Outcome It Is | What gets measured gets strengthened |
Frequently Asked Questions
What is workplace culture and why does it matter?
Workplace culture is the lived experience of working somewhere. It's whether people feel safe raising problems, whether managers support their teams or just supervise them, and whether the way things actually work matches what the organization says it values. Culture is a business outcome. Gallup's research consistently shows that teams in high-engagement cultures outperform those in low-engagement ones by significant margins across profitability, productivity, and customer outcomes.
How does AI affect workplace culture?
AI introduces uncertainty about skills, roles, and job security — and that uncertainty has a direct effect on how people show up at work. JFF's 2026 research found that most workers feel their employers are not doing enough to help them prepare. Organizations that address this directly — with honest communication and real skill investment — tend to come out of AI transitions with stronger cultures, not weaker ones.
What are the most important factors in building a strong workplace culture?
The research keeps pointing to the same things: psychological safety, manager quality, clear communication, and consistent inclusion. Google's Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the most important factor in team performance. Gallup's data shows managers drive roughly 70% of team engagement. These aren't soft topics — they're the operating conditions that determine whether your people do their best work.
How long does it take to improve workplace culture?
Some things move quickly. A manager who starts giving better feedback, a leadership team that begins communicating more honestly, a meeting culture that creates more space for different voices — all of these can shift within weeks in ways people actually notice. Deeper structural change, like rebuilding trust after a difficult period, takes longer — often six to eighteen months. The variable that matters most isn't timeline. It's consistency.
Where to Start to Improve Workplace Culture
Culture work can feel overwhelming when you look at all of it at once. It helps to remember that culture is changed incrementally. One manager who learns to give better feedback, one team that starts communicating more honestly, one leadership decision that shows people they're valued.
Pick two things from the list above that feel most relevant to where your organization is right now. Work on them with real consistency over the next quarter. That's how culture actually moves.
If you're not sure where to start, a culture assessment is a good first step. It gives you data instead of assumptions, and data makes for much better decisions.
