Not with one number. But you can measure its fingerprints.
Culture isn't a KPI. But it leaves a trail.
You can see it in patterns of absence, retention, employee experience, management capability, performance and workforce behaviour.
The important question is not whether any one of these measures is “good” or “bad”.It's what they tell you when you look at them together.
Consider an organisation where:
• Engagement is reasonable
• Absence is rising
• Turnover is concentrated within particular teams
• Managers are reporting increasing pressure
• Performance is becoming inconsistent
Which metric should leadership pay attention to? The answer is probably not one of them. The value lies in understanding the relationship between them. This is the difference between workforce reporting and workforce intelligence.
Reporting tells you what happened. Intelligence helps you ask why.
CULTURE ISN'T A SCORE
The temptation when talking about culture is to look for a number.
• An engagement score
• A wellbeing score
• An employer Net Promoter Score
• A retention rate
Numbers are useful. But they can also create a false sense of certainty. An organisation might report strong engagement while experiencing rising absence. A business might have low overall turnover while losing critical skills from a particular team. A leadership team might report high confidence in its culture while employees experience something quite different on the ground.
None of these measures are necessarily wrong. They are simply partial views of a much bigger picture.
Culture is experienced through thousands of interactions, decisions and behaviours. It is shaped by what leaders do, what managers reinforce, what employees see being rewarded and what the organisation consistently tolerates.
So rather than asking: “What's our culture score?”
A better question might be: “What evidence are we seeing about the way people experience and behave within our organisation?”
LOOK FOR THE FINGERPRINTS
If culture leaves a trail, where should leaders look? There are obvious places.
Employee experience
What are people telling you about their working environment?
Do they feel trusted? Supported? Heard? Able to challenge decisions? Clear about expectations?
And importantly, are those experiences consistent across the organisation?
Absence
Absence is often treated as a cost or operational metric. But patterns can tell a different story.
Is absence increasing in particular teams?
Has it changed following a leadership or organisational change?
Are there relationships between workload, management experience and absence?
The number itself doesn't tell you the cause. But the pattern may tell you where to look.
Retention
Overall turnover can be useful, but averages can hide important differences.
Who is leaving? Where are they leaving from? How long have they been with the organisation?
Are particular managers, roles, locations or employee groups experiencing significantly different retention?
Again, the number isn't the answer.
It's the question behind the number that matters.
Management capability
Managers have an enormous influence on employee experience. But organisations don't always connect management behaviour with wider workforce outcomes.
What happens in teams where managers have high levels of pressure, low confidence or limited support?
And what happens where managers are well equipped, trusted and able to lead effectively?
These are questions worth exploring alongside workforce data.
Performance
Ultimately, culture matters because organisations need to perform. The question is whether the conditions people experience are helping them do that.
• Are people able to make decisions quickly?
• Can they challenge poor thinking?
• Do teams collaborate effectively?
• Are priorities clear?
• Is workload sustainable?
• Are people spending their energy creating value, or are they navigating organisational friction?
These are cultural questions. They are also performance questions.
THE PROBLEM WITH THE AVERAGE
One of the biggest traps in workforce data is the average. An organisation can report a perfectly respectable engagement score while very different experiences exist underneath it. Imagine an organisation with 1,000 employees. Overall engagement is positive. But, one business unit has significantly lower scores, higher absence and considerably higher turnover.
The overall organisational figure may barely move. From a distance, everything looks fine.
At team level, something very different may be happening. This is why culture needs to be understood at the level where people actually experience it. The organisation wide number tells you what is happening on average. The variation tells you where the story might be.
That distinction matters.
Because if leaders only look at the headline, they can miss the pockets of the organisation where culture is creating friction, or where something is working exceptionally well and could be replicated elsewhere.
DON'T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSE
There is an important caveat. Connecting data doesn't mean automatically proving causation. If a team has higher absence and lower engagement, it doesn't mean one has definitively caused the other.
There could be other factors at play.
• Organisational change
• Seasonality
• Resourcing
• Role complexity
• Leadership Changes
• External pressures
This is why workforce intelligence isn't about finding a single answer as quickly as possible. It's about identifying patterns worth investigating. Good data should not replace leadership judgement.
It should make that judgement better informed.
FROM REPORTING TO INTELLIGENCE
This is where the conversation needs to move forward.
Traditional workforce reporting tends to answer:
• How many people are absent?
• What is our turnover rate?
• What is engagement score
• How many employees do we have?
These are important questions. But leadership teams increasingly need to ask what comes next.
• Where is absence changing?
• Why is turnover concentrated in particular areas?
• Where are employee experiences materially different?
• What workforce patterns sit alongside changes in performance?
That shift is subtle but significant.
Reporting describes the organisation. Intelligence helps leadership understand it.
And that understanding creates the opportunity to act differently.
THE CULTURE–PERFORMANCE CONNECTION
Culture can sometimes be dismissed as a “soft” subject because its impact isn't always immediately visible on a balance sheet. But the consequences of culture often are. If people don't feel able to speak up, organisations can make poorer decisions.
If managers are rewarded for delivering results at any cost, sustainable performance can suffer.
If employees experience chronic workload pressure, absence and turnover can increase.
If people don't trust leadership, organisational change becomes harder.
If good performance depends on individual heroics rather than effective systems, the organisation becomes harder to scale.
These aren't simply cultural concerns. They are operational concerns.
Which is why the culture conversation needs to move beyond:
“Are our employees happy?” towards: “What conditions are we creating for people to perform well?”
WHAT ARE YOU REWARDING?
Perhaps one of the most revealing ways to understand culture is to look at what gets rewarded.
Not what appears in the values statement. What actually gets recognised.
• Who gets promoted
• Who gets listened to
• Who gets given opportunities
• Who is described as “high performer”
And what happens when someone delivers exceptional results but creates problems for everyone around them?
Organisations send powerful cultural signals through these decisions. If collaboration is supposedly important but individual heroics are consistently celebrated, employees notice.
If wellbeing is a stated priority but people who work excessive hours are rewarded with greater visibility, employees notice.If innovation is encouraged but failure is punished, employees notice.
If challenge is welcomed in theory but difficult questions are consistently shut down, employees notice.
People learn culture by watching what happens.
Not by reading what is written down.
THREE QUESTIONS FOR LEADERS
If you want to start looking at culture through a performance lens, ask:
1. Where are the patterns?
Don't just look at organisation-wide averages.
Look across teams, functions, locations, roles and time.
Where is the employee experience different?
Where are workforce outcomes changing?
2. What might be connected?
Look at employee experience alongside absence, retention, management capability and performance.
Not to prove causation, but to identify relationships worth exploring.
3. What are we reinforcing?
Look at the behaviours your organisation actually rewards.
• What gets recognised?
• What gets promoted?
• What gets tolerated?
And are those behaviours aligned with the performance you need?
THE PULSE POINT PERSPECTIVE
The future of workforce insight isn't about collecting more data for the sake of it. Most organisations already have plenty.The opportunity is to connect what they already know.
Employee experience can tell you how people are experiencing work. Workforce data can show you where patterns are emerging.
Organisational data can help you understand the performance context.
Together, these sources can create a much richer picture. Not a definitive answer. Not a single culture score.
Something more useful:
A clearer view of where leadership attention may be needed. Because the value of data isn't simply knowing what happened.
It's knowing where to look next.
SO, CAN YOU MEASURE CULTURE?
Yes.
But perhaps not in the way we have traditionally tried to. You can't reduce culture to a single number.
You can't fully understand it through an annual survey. And you certainly can't measure it by looking only at what an organisation says about itself.
But you can look for its fingerprints;
• In behaviour
• In experience
• In patterns
• In decisions
• In what gets rewarded
• In what gets tolerated
And in the relationship between people and organisational performance. The question for leadership teams isn't: “What's our culture score?”
It's: “What is our culture enabling and what might it be getting in the way of?”
That is a much harder question. But it's also a much more useful one.
ONE FINAL QUESTION
If you looked at your workforce data alongside your employee experience and performance data, what patterns would you expect to find?
And perhaps more importantly:
Are you looking for them?
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