How to Assess Workplace Culture: Look Beyond the Employee Survey

If you want to know how to assess workplace culture, the honest answer is that you can't do it from a survey alone.

Surveys have their place, and in Australia they matter more than ever. A well-run engagement or psychosocial survey shows you what's happening across the whole workforce at once, and it's one useful source of information for identifying psychosocial hazards. But consultation can't stop at a survey. Workers often know where the friction is, what's causing it, and what might actually fix it, and Safe Work Australia is clear that consultation with workers is part of properly identifying and managing psychosocial risk.

But a survey is a bit like checking your oil with a dipstick. You pull it out, glance at the level and the colour, and you get a quick read on whether something's off. It's fast, it's better than nothing, and it'll tell you when there's a problem. What it won't do is fix anything. To actually change the oil, you have to get your hands dirty. Drain the old, swap the filter, pour in the new. The dipstick told you something was wrong. It didn't do the work.

Assessing culture properly is the same. The survey is the dipstick. The real assessment happens when you look at what's actually going on underneath, and that's what this article is about.

Culture is what happens, not what's written on the wall

Here's the core idea, and two of the most-followed voices in this space land on it from different directions.

Simon Sinek puts it simply: culture is values plus behaviour, and behaviour follows what you measure. An organisation can print "collaboration" on the wall, but if it only ever measures and rewards individual output, people quickly learn what actually matters. As Sinek also puts it, leadership sets the tone and the conditions, and if you get the conditions right, the organisation thrives.

Gary Vaynerchuk comes at it less academically. He calls culture "a texture, a vibe, a feel," the heartbeat of a company. But underneath the language is a sharp point: you don't build culture with perks, gyms or snacks. You build it by talking to people one by one and understanding what they actually care about.

Put those together and you get the principle behind assessing culture well. You can't understand a culture from what an organisation says it values. You understand it from what actually happens. So here's how to look.

1. Listen

Surveys show you what's happening across the business. Conversations help you understand why. And the things that matter most are usually the things people won't write on a form, even an anonymous one.

Gary took this idea far enough that VaynerMedia created a "Chief Heart Officer" role, designed in part to scale his people-first approach across hundreds of employees, someone whose remit was culture, people and connection, and who could surface what staff wouldn't tell management directly. Most businesses don't need a dedicated role. They need leaders who actually talk to people, and who've built enough safety that people tell them the truth.

This matters more now than it used to. In a world racing to automate and survey and dashboard everything, actually sitting down with a human and listening has become rare, and valuable. A number on a chart tells you something changed. A conversation tells you why.

2. Observe

Watch what happens in the room. Who speaks in meetings and who stays quiet? What happens when someone brings bad news, admits a mistake or disagrees with someone senior?

That last one is the real test of psychological safety. Sinek describes a trusting team as one where a person can comfortably say "I made a mistake," "I don't know," or "I need help" without fear of humiliation. You learn far more by watching what happens when someone actually does that than by asking people to rate their safety out of ten. We've written more about what causes a lack of psychological safety if you want to go deeper.

3. Follow the incentives

This is probably the sharpest lens of all. Who gets promoted, rewarded and protected here?

Sinek's well-known framing plots people on two axes: performance and trust. His uncomfortable finding is that a high performer who destroys trust can do more damage to a team than a moderate performer who builds it. So the question that tells you the truth about a culture is simple. When someone hits their numbers but leaves damage in their wake, does the organisation still reward and protect them? If it does, that tells you more than any values statement ever will.

What gets measured, rewarded and tolerated is the culture. The rest is decoration.

4. Examine the conditions

This is where a real assessment goes deeper than either Sinek or Gary tends to.

Behaviour doesn't happen in a vacuum. Before you conclude that people need confidence training or managers need resilience training, look at the conditions producing the behaviour. Workload. Role clarity. Autonomy. Manager support. Communication. The physical environment. Feedback systems. Psychosocial hazards.

If people aren't speaking up, the useful question isn't "how do we make them more confident?" It's "what happens here when someone speaks up?" If managers are drowning, it isn't "how do we make them more resilient?" It's "what's generating this workload and all this escalation?" If people have stopped offering ideas, don't run a workshop on innovation. Find out what happened to the last ten ideas they raised. The behaviour is usually a symptom. The conditions are the cause.

5. Follow the outcomes

Turnover. Absenteeism. Safety incidents. Customer complaints. Burnout signals. Suggestions that went nowhere. The manager everything bottlenecks through.

The mistake is treating each of these as its own isolated problem to be managed. More often they're symptoms of the same underlying system. Read together, they tell you where the culture is quietly costing you, long before it shows up anywhere obvious on a balance sheet.

6. Test it

Here's the step most culture assessments skip. Don't spend six months diagnosing.

Find one recurring friction point. Change one condition around it. Then watch what happens. This is the Toyota principle of continuous improvement applied to culture: you learn more from changing one real thing and observing the result than from another quarter of analysis. Assessment and improvement aren't separate phases. The best way to understand a culture is to try to move it, gently, and see how it responds.

How to assess workplace culture: read the soil, not just the plant

There's a thread running through all six of these, and it's the way we think about culture at Base State.

Sinek focuses mostly on trust, behaviour and leadership. Gary focuses on empathy, listening and communication. Both are right, and we'd add one level underneath: behaviour grows out of conditions, the same way a plant grows out of soil. If you want to understand why a plant is struggling, you don't lecture the plant. You test the soil.

That's the heart of a regenerative workplace culture. Don't just assess what your people are doing. Assess the conditions growing that behaviour. Fix the conditions, and the behaviour tends to follow.

The bottom line

Knowing how to assess workplace culture means going beyond the survey. Use the survey to get a snapshot across the business. It's your dipstick. But don't mistake the snapshot for the assessment. The real work is in listening to people, observing what actually happens, following what gets rewarded, examining the conditions underneath, reading the outcomes as a system, and testing small changes to see how the culture responds. Culture isn't what a business says it values. It's what actually happens, and what happens is shaped by the conditions you build.

If you want a fast, honest starting point, our free Team Culture Scorecard takes about five minutes and gives you a read across six of those conditions, a good dipstick before you get your hands dirty.

If you'd like to discover whether Base State can help your business perform better, click here to enquire.

Culture that drives performance.

The six lenses above are the core of the Base State Method, our approach to reading and improving workplace culture.