Culture isn’t a values poster. It’s whether people feel heard.

I’ve come to believe that company culture is decided in a small number of unglamorous moments: whether a complaint gets taken seriously, whether the same rules apply to the VP as they do to the new hire, whether someone who raises a hard truth gets thanked for it or quietly frozen out. Get those moments right, consistently, and trust compounds. Get them wrong even occasionally, and no values poster in the breakroom will save you.

The formula, in my experience, is simpler than most companies make it. People need to feel genuinely heard: not placated, not managed, actually heard. And they need to see accountability applied evenly, including to the people with the most power to avoid it. Those two things together are what trust is actually made of. Everything else is decoration.

This isn’t just a nice sentiment. It shows up directly on the balance sheet. Gallup’s Q12 meta-analysis of business units found that the most engaged teams are 23% more profitable and 18% more productive than the least engaged, with far lower turnover, absenteeism, and safety incidents along the way. On the other side of the ledger, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 puts the cost of low engagement at roughly $10 trillion a year, about 9% of global GDP, in lost productivity. Engagement isn’t a soft metric. It’s downstream of trust, and trust is downstream of how people are actually treated when it counts.

This is also where I think a lot of well-meaning HR and legal advice falls short: it treats employee relations as a compliance exercise instead of a human one. You can follow every procedural step correctly and still leave someone feeling dismissed, because the letter of the process isn’t the same thing as being genuinely listened to. That gap is where trust quietly erodes, one interaction at a time, long before it shows up in an exit interview or a lawsuit.

It’s also where I try to spend the most of myself. Twenty years of doing this work (investigations, terminations, the hard conversations nobody wants to have) has taught me that the legal analysis is almost never the hard part. The hard part is reading a room accurately, hearing what someone actually means underneath what they’re saying, and holding people accountable without making them feel like they’ve been reduced to a policy violation. That’s not a skill you pick up from a statute. It’s earned, case by case, person by person.

Accountability has to run in both directions to mean anything. A culture where junior employees get written up for minor missteps while a high performer’s pattern of behavior gets quietly excused isn’t a culture at all. It’s a hierarchy wearing culture’s clothes, and employees can tell the difference immediately.

If your team is bigger than it used to be, or your culture doesn’t feel like it used to, that’s usually not a sign something is broken beyond repair. It’s usually a sign it’s time for a conversation.