When culture doesn’t change, despite best efforts
“We’ve tried training, HR processes, OD support… and nothing has changed.”
This is something I hear often when organisations get in touch.
This post is the first in a short blog series on 'culture repair'.
Across the series, I’ll explore:
why culture problems are so often attributed to individuals
how informal power and cliques shape team dynamics
and why good intentions can still lead to harmful impact
Each post looks beneath surface behaviour to understand the systems and contexts that sustain unhealthy cultures.
When effort isn’t the issue
When culture problems persist in a team, it isn’t always because people aren’t trying hard enough to improve things.
In many cases, there has been significant effort. Leaders have invested time, resources, and attention. Staff have sat through training, workshops, and change initiatives.
What’s often missing isn’t commitment.
It’s understanding.
Action has come before a clear diagnosis of what is actually driving the culture.
Why behaviour becomes the focus
Most organisations respond at the level of behaviour.
That makes sense. Behaviour is what’s visible. It’s what causes disruption, complaints, and concern. It’s what shows up in performance conversations and employee relations processes.
But behaviour is rarely the whole story.
More often, behaviour is a response to something deeper in the system people are operating within.
What often sits underneath team culture problems
When I work with teams where culture change hasn’t stuck, I often see underlying dynamics such as:
informal power shaping who feels safe to speak
silence developing as a form of self-protection
fear of consequences or being labelled “difficult”
past decisions that have quietly defined what feels safe or unsafe
These dynamics tend to build over time. They are rarely intentional, but they strongly influence how people adapt their behaviour at work.
When you view behaviour through this lens, it becomes easier to understand why surface-level interventions struggle to create lasting change.
The risk of assumption-led culture repair
When attempts to repair team culture aren’t grounded in a thorough diagnosis, they tend to be based on assumptions about what the team needs.
Those assumptions are usually well-intended.
But they can be counterproductive.
Interventions that don’t account for context, history and informal dynamics risk reinforcing the very patterns they are trying to change.
This is one of the reasons organisations can cycle through multiple initiatives without seeing meaningful improvement.
A pause worth taking
If culture hasn’t improved despite repeated attempts, that’s worth pausing over.
It’s rarely a sign that people don’t care.
More often, it suggests that the problem hasn’t been fully understood yet.
In the next post in this series, I’ll explore why culture problems are so often framed as issues with individuals, and what tends to be missed when we focus there.
Nicole Williams is an occupational and coaching psychologist specialising in culture repair, team dynamics and psychologically safe workplaces.
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