Every business has two cultures. There is the one the MD describes to new hires and potential clients and then there is the one that actually runs the place.
Want to know which one yours really is? Think about the last time you were out of the office for a day or two.
While you were away something came up. Perhaps a supplier issue or an unhappy customer or a decision that needed making immediately.
Did your operations manager handle it? Did your team come together and resolve it without needing your input?
Or did everything pause until you were back at your desk?
For most MDs the honest answer is that the issue waited. The decision got delayed and someone from the senior team sent a message asking what to do.
Despite years of experience and deep knowledge of your business your leadership team still looked to you before they acted. The question is why.
The reason is that your organisation has trained them to behave this way. Not through a policy document or a company memo but through hundreds of small signals over time. They have learned that running things past you first is safer than making the call themselves.
This is your company culture in action.
Not the values on your website or the words in your staff handbook but the real behaviours that shape how your people work when nobody senior is watching.
Ask most managing directors to describe their culture and you'll get a pause. Maybe a vague answer about teamwork or customer focus.
That's fine. But it misses the point.
Culture isn't about slogans. It's about behaviour.
It's in how decisions get made across your departments. How problems get raised between teams. What happens when something goes wrong and you're not there to fix it.
Recent research from CIPD Ireland suggests that investment in workplace culture is slipping down the priority list for many organisations. Culture is increasingly treated as something to declare in a policy document rather than something to build and maintain on purpose.
But in the SMEs we work with actual culture reveals itself in ordinary moments not formal statements.
Your real company culture appears in small everyday situations across your organisation:
Here's what matters: your people already know what the real culture is.
They know what gets rewarded. What gets tolerated. And what gets ignored.
If that picture doesn't match the one you'd describe to a new senior hire the gap isn't a communication problem. It's a sign that culture has been left to form on its own rather than being built with intention.
Auditing culture is not a once a year staff survey. It's a leadership discipline.
Start by writing down what your business genuinely values. Usually three or four core statements. Be honest not aspirational.
For each value ask yourself: what actually happens when your teams are left on their own to get on with their work?
Here are practical questions that reveal more than any sophisticated culture audit:
These small moments tell you more about your real culture than any formal survey ever will.
We ran exactly this exercise with an industrial machinery distribution business with 45 employees across three locations.
We compared their three stated values Customers First, Accountability and Learn From Mistakes against how the teams actually behaved. Specifically how they handled customer issues and escalations between departments.
The gap was wider than expected particularly around how mistakes were dealt with across the business.
However closing it didn't require a big change programme. It meant:
Within six months escalations dropped by 80%.
As the MD put it: "It feels like everyone knows what they need to do and the relationship between teams has never been this great."
Before you finish reading answer these honestly:
If any of these questions hit a nerve that's useful information.
Fixing a culture gap doesn't require a transformation project. It requires clarity across your organisation.
Here's a simple starting point:
| Problem | Solution |
|---|---|
| Decisions wait for you or your senior team | Define decision rights for each management level |
| Complaints get stuck between departments | Clarify ownership by complaint type |
| New starters across teams struggle | Create a structured first week schedule for every role |
| Team leaders unsure if they're doing well | Introduce regular specific feedback from their managers |
The goal isn't perfection. It's closing the gap between what you say you value and what actually happens across your business day to day.
A company culture audit is a structured review of how your business actually operates compared to how you think it does. It looks at behaviours across teams, decision making patterns between departments and how your people are treated not just what's written in policies.
Culture audits work best as an ongoing leadership discipline rather than a once a year exercise. Review key indicators quarterly with your management team and conduct a deeper audit annually.
Common signs include: decisions waiting for senior approval on routine matters, high staff turnover across departments, new starters struggling to understand "how things work here" and team members reluctant to raise concerns with their managers.
Absolutely. SMEs often benefit most because culture problems show up faster and fixes can be implemented across the organisation without layers of bureaucracy slowing things down.
Small targeted changes can show results within three to six months. Larger shifts across multiple teams and locations typically take 12 to 18 months of consistent effort from your leadership team.