Should You Hire a Workplace Culture Consultant, or Do It Yourself?
Before you hire a workplace culture consultant, it’s worth asking whether you could just do it yourself. Some businesses can. Plenty can’t. The honest version of the question is whether you’ve got the time, the objectivity and the know-how to diagnose the real problem and improve it without making things worse.
I think of it like changing the oil in your own car. If you know how, go for it. It’s cheaper and it’s a good skill to have. If you don’t, you’re weighing the cost of a mechanic against the time, the mistakes, and the mess you’re left with if it goes wrong. Culture and performance work is the same. The job isn’t hard to describe. Doing it well, without creating a bigger mess, is where it gets real.
Why do so many businesses get culture wrong on their own?
The most common failure isn’t laziness. It’s two things: bias, and aiming at the wrong target.
The bias part is simple. A business decides to do something for the staff, and what they land on is usually what the owner or the manager would want, not what would actually help. A one-off event. A perk. An incentive nobody asked for. It lands for a few people and misses everyone else.
The bigger issue is the target. A lot of well-meant culture efforts try to give people things, when the real job is to look at what’s getting in the way of people doing good work, and change it. Workload. Unclear roles. Incentives built on guesswork. Clunky systems. Poor communication. Decisions nobody understands. Feedback that only travels one way. Manager behaviour. That’s the actual terrain of culture, and a lot of it is less fun than a pizza afternoon. Fix the work, not the worker.
There’s a perspective gap underneath a lot of this too. Some founders have spent very little of their working life as employees, which makes it harder to see the business from that side. They’ve got the drive, they built the thing, and they can end up expecting staff to care the way an owner does.
And that’s worth being careful with. People aren’t only there for the paycheck. Most of us want to be part of something and to feel some purpose in what we do, and we spend a huge chunk of our lives at work. So if your people look like they’re just turning up for the money, that’s often less about them and more about the conditions and the tone being set above them.
That’s the real gap. Not effort. Perspective.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this. I worked somewhere that was sure the incentives they offered were what we all wanted. For a few people, they were, and those few pushed harder. For everyone else, they did nothing. The mistake wasn’t really picking the wrong reward. It was building a whole performance system on assumptions instead of evidence. Nobody had asked. A few honest conversations would have shown them what actually moved people, and what was quietly getting in the way.
Doing it badly can leave you worse off than doing nothing
Staff notice. If you roll something out and the effort is obvious, some people will appreciate that you tried. A lot won’t. If it isn’t done properly, they’ll roll their eyes, because they can see the change on the surface and feel that nothing underneath has moved.
So doing this badly isn’t neutral. People can become more cynical. Trust can drop. And the next time you try something real, they’ve already written it off as show. It’s the same reason wellbeing programs fall short when they sit on top of the real conditions instead of changing them.
When is doing it yourself the right call?
Let me be straight, because this isn’t a piece about why you must hire someone. Plenty of businesses can do this in-house, and should.
Here’s a rough test. Run through these honestly:
Can your people actually speak honestly to you, or do they tell you what you want to hear?
Can you separate the symptoms from the root causes?
Do your leaders have the time to act on what they hear, not just collect it?
Can you measure whether the changes actually worked?
If that’s mostly yes, doing it yourself is a sensible call, and you’ll build a genuinely valuable skill in-house. If it’s mostly no, that’s where outside objectivity starts to earn its keep. Telling the symptoms from the root causes is its own craft, and I’ve covered it in how to assess workplace culture. If you’re not sure how you’d answer those four, our Team Culture Diagnostic is a quick way to get a clearer read.
What does a workplace culture consultant actually give you?
A good engagement should build capability inside the business, not dependence on a consultant. That’s the test I’d hold any of us to.
It isn’t someone parachuting in, running a program and leaving. It’s your managers coming out able to do the work themselves: to diagnose what’s actually getting in the way, to draw honest feedback out of a team instead of waiting for it to blow up, to read that different people need different things, and to design from evidence rather than assumption. A lot of what gets in the way sits in the recognised psychosocial hazards, so there’s a real map to work from.
That’s why the manager is the lever worth pulling. Gallup research finds managers account for around 70 per cent of the variance in team engagement. (Gallup) Lift the manager, and you lift everyone around them.
It takes the load off, not onto your managers
One more thing, because it’s a real fear. Owners worry a culture project means more work for already-stretched managers. Done right, it’s the opposite. A good consultant carries the diagnosis, the structure and the heavy lifting, and coaches your managers through it, so they’re led through the work rather than buried under it.
So, should you hire a workplace culture consultant?
If you’ve got the time, the objectivity and the skills to diagnose the real problems and keep improving on them, doing it yourself is a genuinely good option.
If you’re stretched, if you suspect you’re designing off assumptions, or if you can’t afford to get it wrong and start again, that’s when a workplace culture consultant pays for itself. Not by taking the work away and disappearing. By leaving your managers better able to do it themselves.
Either way, the shift is the same. Stop guessing what your people want, and stop giving them what you’d want. Find out what’s actually getting in the way of good work, and change it.
Frequently asked questions
Should I hire a workplace culture consultant or do it myself?
It depends on time, objectivity and skill. If your people speak honestly to you, you can tell symptoms from root causes, your leaders have time to act, and you can measure whether changes worked, doing it in-house is a sensible option. If not, a workplace culture consultant brings the objectivity and method, and a lot of the value is in avoiding the cost of getting it wrong and starting again.
What does a workplace culture consultant actually do?
A good one diagnoses what’s getting in the way of people doing good work, things like workload, role clarity, incentives, systems, communication, feedback loops and manager behaviour, helps change those conditions, and coaches your managers so the capability stays in the business rather than creating dependence on a consultant.
Can doing culture work badly make things worse?
Yes. Staff can tell when a change is surface-level. If the effort is visible and nothing underneath actually changes, people get cynical, complain more, and trust the next attempt less. Done badly, it can leave you worse off than doing nothing.
Not sure whether you need outside help?
Start with the Team Culture Diagnostic. It’ll give you a clearer picture of what’s actually happening in your team before you decide whether to tackle it internally or bring someone in. If you’d rather talk it through, get in touch.
Base State works with businesses of any size, at competitive rates. And while we’re building our case studies, there’s a simple guarantee: if we agree on the result we’re working towards and you implement the changes we agree on, we’ll keep working with you until we get there.
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