“Culture is the stories that live in our nervous system—and their emotional signatures. Marketing teams know this. Branding teams use it. The question is—why don’t we?”
On the 8th of July 2007 (07/08/07), Boeing staged a global unveiling of its long-awaited 787 Dreamliner. Broadcast to more than 45,000 employees and millions of viewers online, the event promised a revolution in aviation. Executives beamed in front of the new aircraft. The messaging was bold: innovation, readiness, the future of flight.
Internally, many of us knew the truth. The plane wasn’t ready. The aircraft presented that day was a hollow shell—major components were missing, systems uninstalled, and engineering design work still underway. As reported by Al Jazeera, the rollout was primarily a “stock price event,” staged to win investor confidence rather than showcase operational integrity.
As an engineer on the program at the time, I remember the disconnect vividly. The new global build strategy was falling apart at the seams. Resources were tight. Partner teams were behind. Tools were clunky, and real obstacles stood in the way of delivery: cultural and structural. So watching our limited energy redirected toward a PR moment felt disingenuous.
If resources are limited, shouldn’t we use them to build excellence—not just perform it?
What I witnessed at Boeing wasn’t an anomaly. It was a familiar pattern in modern business: an outsized investment in how things look, and an underinvestment in how well things actually work on the inside.
We see this everywhere—from PR buzzwords that ignore systemic dysfunction to values statements espoused, but unsupported by programming budget or structural authority. Over time, this performance-over-practice approach erodes not only trust, but organizational capacity and value.
It’s time to name it: we are living in an era where the performance of culture often eclipses the practice of culture—and it’s not only hurting our organizations, but its contributing more broadly to a culture that values looks over books and style over substance. The truth is that I was part of a large group of employees who were aware of the disconnect and motivated to solve the problem, but a glaring lack of leadership engagement with employees to solve the problem together meant the energy and drive we had to improve things was not being harnessed. The supply chain disruptions that delayed the aircraft cost the company $11 billion.
The Cost of the Disconnect
Culture remains one of the least-resourced, most misunderstood aspects of business strategy. While the average company spends 9–11% of revenue on marketing and branding, investments in internal culture systems—learning, trust-building, feedback, belonging—average just 1–2% (ATD, Deloitte, SHRM).
The discrepancy is staggering. We measure brand in dollars. We measure culture in vibes.
The brand ecosystem is centralized, resourced, and managed. The culture ecosystem is fragmented and invisible. Leadership teams plan brand budgets down to the decimal, but few can tell you who “owns” psychological safety or what’s actually being measured inside their performance systems.
Culture becomes everybody’s job and nobody’s budget.
This wouldn’t be a problem if culture didn’t impact performance. But it does—profoundly.
- Disengaged employees cost the world s $9.6 Trillion (Gallup, 2024)
- Only 26% of employees report feeling psychologically safe (McKinsey, 2022)
- 80% of senior leaders experience chronic emotional exhaustion (Deloitte, 2022)
- Turnover rates in tech hover between 13–21%, often due to trust breakdowns (LinkedIn, 2022)
And yet, most companies gather employee sentiment through once-a-year surveys, and rarely act on the results. At Boeing, our annual survey often generated powerful insights—but they held little sway in strategic planning. As a younger engineer at the time, I listened to the stories of how the company had stopped being an engineering and quality first company. This pain was often felt by employees as leaders pushed forward with cost cutting measures without pausing to listen and respond to what employees were thinking, feeling, and recommending. I, like many other engineers, was craving a more connected and aligned workplace culture so we could be better together, from the inside out.
Nearly half of companies conducting employee engagement surveys never take follow-up action (SHRM). This gap creates organizational drag and distrust. What’s the point of asking if you don’t plan to listen?
By contrast, companies that treat culture as a strategic system—one with feedback loops, shared language, and long-term metrics—experience dramatically improved outcomes in engagement, innovation, and retention.
What Culture Investment Actually Includes
- Psychological safety
- Internal communications
- Performance evaluation systems
- Conflict navigation & repair
- Inclusion, trust, and equity initiatives
- Rituals, offsites, and shared learning
Culture is not just employee satisfaction. It’s the emotional infrastructure of execution.
Culture Is Not a Perk. It’s a System
Ask a group of employees how they know a workplace has good culture, and they won’t point to policies or posters. They’ll say: You can feel it. It’s there in how people greet each other. In the tone of meetings. In the openness of questions and the safety of feedback. But it doesn’t end there – it becomes codified into organizational systems through visible processes – things like rewards and recognition, organizational strategy, employee learning and development and perhaps the most significant of them all: performance management.
Culture lives in bodies and behaviors. And like any system, it can be designed—or defaulted.
At Atlassian, Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano saw this disconnect firsthand—and decided to close the gap. As Global Head of Diversity and Belonging, she led a redesign of the company’s performance management system, turning values into measurable, equitable processes.
As one leader at Atlassian described it, their goal was to “rip apart the traditional performance review,” and replace it with a more lightweight, continuous model. Instead of focusing on ratings, they would tailor reviews to each individual contributor’s performance and strength. No more “rate yourself 1-5,” no more distributed curve.
In place of it, Aubrey and her team introduced a new framework that evaluated employees across three equally weighted dimensions:
- Role expectations
- Team contributions
- Values alignment
This approach ensured that collaboration, care, and emotional labor were recognized—not just technical output. This solution reinforced my own experience with what felt like biased and unfair systems. Bias was addressed with transparency, automation, and training. Beyond the basic role expectations, Aubrey and her team were able to codify values and teamwork into explicit organizational systems.
“I’m normalizing talking about bias, not normalizing bias,” she explained. “You have to communicate both: that everyone has bias, and that we still hold a standard.”
“Atlassian is a really special company,” she added, “but I don’t think they’re so special that other companies couldn’t replicate our results. So when people say, ‘We don’t have money for DEI,’ well—I’m skeptical. You can decide to assess people on different things.”
The results for Atlassian are clear:
- Within weeks of launch, every Atlassian staff member had 1:1 conversations with management about their strengths, likes and dislikes of their current work, and how to focus more time on things they love.
- A newly implemented Kudos model (in place of ineffective performance incentives) has led to 150 peer-kudos gifts and spontaneous peer-recognition for 75% of the team’s outstanding performers. No formal process required.
- Staff engagement has gone through the roof: 87% for independent staff and 83% for internal staff, making Atlassian an employer of choice both internally and externally.
- In the last year Atlassian has won several Best Employer awards, including appearing on the list of Best US medium sized companies to work for, and earning the coveted Australian HR Leader’s Employer of the Decade award.
Bottom line: integrity can be designed. And if you have the intention, structure, and political will to accomplish it, the rewards are well worth the investment through addressing the threats that unfair and biased systems play in blocking safe and healthy workplace cultures.
The ROI of Real Investment
Atlassian’s surge in reputation and employee satisfaction isn’t an outlier result. Across industries, the return on culture is not speculative. It’s measurable—and predictive.
What we’re seeing in the data:
- Teams with high psychological safety have 19% higher productivity (Google)
- Engaged employees are 59% less likely to leave (Gallup)
- High-trust companies outperform peers by 350% financially (Fortune)
In my own work leading team retreats, cultural intensives, and learning experiences, I’ve seen this transformation happen in real time. When I used the performance management process as a way to engage people rather than devalue and critique, I experienced the positive human results: body language opening up, humanity returning, and collaboration skyrocket. Ideas emerge that were stuck behind fear. What was once performative becomes real—and work improves.
The companies who will win in the new era of high-expectations and strong employee voices are the ones who stop evaluating culture like it’s a quarterly morale boost and start treating it like what it is: a business system that governs everything from decision velocity to customer AND employee experience: one that transcends the implicit realm of stories and beliefs to the explicit realm of organizational systems and processes.
Six Imperatives for Culture-First Leadership
It’s time to stop treating culture like a vibe—and start funding it like the operating system it truly is. So if you’re ready to stop giving lip-service to company culture and start doing something about it, I’ve got some tips to help you get started. In my 15 years working with organizations to facilitate cultural change, these six fundamentals are the ones I live and work by:
1. Make Culture Someone’s Job—and Budget It Accordingly
Culture isn’t a side project. Assign executive ownership (ideally reporting to the CEO), dedicate real budget, and measure progress like you would a product launch. Roles like Chief People Officer or Head of Culture should be resourced, empowered, and accountable.
2. Redesign the Visible and Invisible Systems
The most toxic cultural signals are often embedded in the mundane: performance reviews, onboarding, feedback, compensation, meeting structure. Map how your current systems reinforce or contradict your stated values—and redesign accordingly.
3. Turn Employee Experience into Strategy, Not Perks
Culture investments should connect directly to outcomes like retention, innovation, and resilience. That means funding team learning, designing better meetings, and tying values to performance—not just offering wellness stipends and swag.
4. Use Story and Emotion as Strategic Tools
Culture lives in story. Amplify narratives from people who embody your future culture, especially those from historically excluded groups. But don’t erase counter-narratives—invite complexity. Real culture transformation honors tension, not just celebration.
5. Build Emotional Intelligence into Leadership Practice
Today’s leaders must know how to navigate conflict, power, and feedback—not just delegate it. Emotional intelligence is not a “soft skill”—it’s the backbone of decision-making, inclusion, and psychological safety. Train for it. Model it.
6. Use Embodied, Playful Experiences to Disrupt the Norm
Transformation isn’t just intellectual—it’s embodied. Experiential learning (from storytelling games to team builds to creative retreats) gives teams a felt sense of change. This creates the emotional conditions for lasting behavior shifts.
Every one of these is essential when building a culture where performance and integrity are in harmony, rather than at odds. It can feel daunting or unwieldy at first glance, but you don’t need to go it alone. There are tons of resources out there on how to best implement this kind of change. My book, Creating Culture, is a great place to start.
I, and others like me, have dedicated our professional lives to helping companies align their output with their values, improve performance, and create real culture. Find us. Ask questions. Get the help you need to walk the walk and take action on your values.
This kind of change requires all of us to put down our slogans, and take the first (and next) step.
Jyoti Jani is a systems strategist, experience designer, and author of Creating Culture: Empowered Leadership for Systems Change. She helps leaders unlock trust, innovation, and psychological safety through retreats, coaching, and creative strategy. Invite Jyoti to speak, facilitate, or co-design your next culture transformation at jyotijani.co