One metric to rule them all – are you intentionally nurturing a thriving culture?

At this point in the year many leaders and managers are exhausted. They’ve been running the business through a peak period and spent months in strategy sessions, alignment calls, and negotiations over next year’s budget. And given top of the list of priorities for CEOs in 2025 is growth it’s very likely a negotiation they didn’t win!

I wonder how many have given even a tenth of this time to considering culture?

In most organisations culture is still an afterthought - something to address after strategies are designed or when crises arise.

And yet - behind every enduringly successful business lies one critical foundation: a thriving culture.

Here’s why I believe every organisation, no matter their size, location or industry, needs to buck the trend and start with culture.

Culture shapes everything

At its core, culture defines how people treat one another—whether it's leaders interacting with teams, peers collaborating, or employees engaging with customers and vendors. Edgar Schein described it as a system of shared assumptions learned and passed down to solve problems, while S.C. Edmonds emphasised that it’s embedded in the daily actions and interactions of an organisation. Culture manifests in both explicit actions, like meetings, and subtler aspects, such as unspoken norms and expectations (e.g. the desks people sit at, the clothes we wear, the speed of response to slack messages, who speaks first in meetings).

Ultimately, culture shapes everything. How we think, feel and what we do.

From how employees feel about coming to work, what they say (and don’t say), the behaviours accepted, levels of wellbeing, even decisions to stay or leave. The culture we create has a profound impact on us as humans and our collective capability to thrive.

Cart before the horse

Despite this understanding, we frequently put the cart before the horse – focusing attention, models and structures first on the business outputs we want to drive.

Brian Elliot wrote a great MIT Sloan article this year describing this as the ‘doom’ loop – resulting in monitoring of behaviour, people performing to metrics, a decline in trust and performance and flooding organisations with feelings of anxiety.

In these conditions, toxic cultures grow and today this is one of the most significant drivers of employee turnover:

• Employees are 10.4 times more likely to leave a company because of toxic culture than because of pay (Sull & Sull, MIT Sloan, 2022)
• Toxic workplaces account for high absenteeism, reduced productivity, and increased attrition. (The American Psychological Association (2023)
• According to the Society for Human Resource Management (2019), poor workplace cultures have cost U.S. companies a staggering $223 billion over five years (SHRM, 2019)

When people thrive, companies do too

When we intentionally cultivate conditions where people thrive, people stay longer, work harder and businesses achieve sustainable growth.

• Companies with a strong learning culture report 30%-50% higher engagement and retention rates (Deloitte, 2023)
• Companies with a strong learning culture report 30%-50% higher engagement and retention rates (Deloitte, 2023)
• Employees who feel trusted are twice as productive (MIT Sloan, 2024)

When leaders choose to prioritise culture, they break free from the “doom loop” and enter a “boom loop,” where trust and autonomy empower employees to innovate and excel.

🏁 It all starts with culture

Thriving cultures are not just about happier employees—they translate directly into measurable business outcomes. In 2024, the World Economic Forum introduced “Workforce Sustainability” as a board-level metric, recognizing that employee well-being predicts financial and stock performance six to twelve months ahead.

Thriving at work means feeling empowered, energised, and excited about the future. But in today’s dynamic world, fewer people report feeling this way. Without action this will block growth for people & organisations.

In today’s world, we need to be in position to solve tomorrow’s unimagined problems with roles and skills we haven’t yet invented.

This requires energy, motivation, agility, and resilience. And this is only possible when we thrive.

Horse then cart!

Four shifts to shape thriving organisations

Building a thriving organisation requires intentional shifts in how we consider, approach and nurture culture:

1. An intentional focus on human growth. So often culture starts and ends with a bunch of values hastily created to prop-up strategy and emblazoned on the walls. Culture needs to come first and focus on intentionally shaping conditions for human growth.
2. Empower everyone to shape culture. Great cultures are not top-down. They’re shaped by everyone. Equipping teams with the tools and support they need to shape cultures they want to be part of is a key component.
3. Keep building positive habits. Moving away from rigid rules and measuring outputs, leaders should focus on cultivating habits and practices that promote belonging and collaboration.
4. Culture is never done. Great cultures don’t appear over-night and they’re never ‘done’. It requires ongoing assessment and evolution to meet changing needs and to keep strengthening foundations for human growth.

Recently, Microsoft shifted from traditional measures of engagement to regular pulses of employee thriving. They recognise the criticality of continuously shaping a culture where their people and teams thrive for sustainable business growth and longevity.

It all starts with creating cultures where people can thrive.

Want to learn how to shape thriving cultures?

Join our webinar ‘Plan to Thrive in 2025’ when I will be joined by fellow Work Psychologist ad Resilience Expert Rachel Austen for an engaging discussion on the actions we can take to intentionally shape workplaces where people, and therefore business, thrive.

🎁 Plus those joining us live will receive an exclusive gift - an opportunity to complete AURA (a leading resilience assessment) & receive a personalised report.

Access expert insight and guidance to strengthen your culture for growth in 2025 and beyond with our Culture Reset Workshop. Get in touch to discuss more.