In this guide, you’ll learn how to keep your finger on the pulse of your company, with detailed advice on assessing corporate culture and putting your findings into action.
It seems like everybody is talking about culture these days. And for good reason. That’s because a good corporate culture provides a clear competitive advantage – helping to boost everything from productivity and morale to retention and recruitment.
So, given its importance, why do so many companies wait until something goes wrong before taking steps to address their corporate culture? The thing about company cultures is that they’re constantly changing. They’re the living, breathing soul of a company that ebbs and flows on a year-by-year, month-by-month and even week-by-week basis. Because it’s in constant flux, smart leaders understand that they need to keep their fingers on the pulse. That’s why assessing corporate culture has become a key concern for organizations.
What is Assessing Corporate Culture?
Assessing corporate culture means evaluating the shared values, beliefs, and behaviors that shape how employees interact and make decisions. Companies assess culture through surveys, interviews, observations, and performance metrics to ensure alignment with strategic goals and identify areas for improvement.
Table of Contents
What is Assessing Corporate Culture?
The Current State of Corporate Culture
Why Should You Assess Corporate Culture?
How To Assess Your Corporate Culture
Sample Questions For Assessing Corporate Culture
How to Choose the Right Questions for Assessing Corporate Culture
The Current State of Corporate Culture
Corporate culture has always mattered—but in the last few years, it’s become a top priority for HR and leadership teams.
After the Great Resignation, employees redefined what they expect from work. They want more than just competitive pay—they want flexibility, purpose, and a sense of belonging. That shift hasn’t faded. In fact, it’s intensified.
By the end of 2023, there were over 9 million unfilled jobs in the U.S. alone, and employees know they have options. Many are still actively considering leaving roles in search of better alignment with their values and lifestyle.
To compete, companies are investing heavily in retention and recruitment strategies—but culture is what separates the good from the great. A strong culture:
- Fosters connection and purpose
- Reinforces shared values
- Makes employees feel seen, appreciated, and proud of where they work
Leaders who prioritize culture aren’t just improving morale—they’re improving business outcomes. When people feel connected to their company’s mission and to each other, they stay longer, perform better, and contribute more.
A thriving culture doesn’t happen by accident. You need to work at it, build it through intentional leadership, and make recognition a habit.” – Jason Lindstrom, CEO & Co-Founder of Bucketlist Rewards
What Is a Culture Assessment?
A culture assessment is like a health check for your company’s culture. It helps you evaluate whether your actual workplace environment aligns with the values and behaviors you promote on paper.
Why It Matters
Even the best-written values mean little if employees don’t experience them day to day. A culture assessment shows whether your people are truly living and feeling the culture you’ve committed to.
How It Works
- Culture assessments typically use surveys or feedback tools with targeted questions about communication, leadership, inclusion, recognition, and team dynamics.
- Unlike engagement surveys that focus on motivation or satisfaction, culture assessments focus on alignment between values and lived experience.
- Results can be tracked over time to monitor progress, spot gaps, and guide cultural improvements.
When to Use It
- Proactively: As part of annual planning or goal tracking
- Reactively: After major organizational change, leadership turnover, or employee feedback signals misalignment
Done well, a culture assessment gives you actionable insight into what’s working—and what needs attention—to build a stronger, more connected workplace.
Why Should You Assess Corporate Culture?
Your culture is like your company’s personality. It’s the way your employees think, feel and act. Typically it’s built on values or ideals that leaders decide upon. In that regard company culture is something of a theoretical exercise. After all, it’s one thing to write down the kind of ideals you want your employees to adhere to, it’s another thing entirely to make sure that they’re actually following them.
Assessing company culture enables you to compare your theoretical idea of your organization with the reality. It’s a tangible measure of how closely your day-to-day operations are aligned with the vision laid out in the company handbook. In this regard, it’s a vital tool for businesses that place a high priority on corporate culture.
The benefits of assessing corporate culture don’t end there, however.
Monitor employee engagement
One of the benefits of assessing corporate culture is that it can often help to boost your employee engagement. That’s because taking the time to question your people and showcase the importance that you place on culture can help them to feel valued and supported. It’s a virtuous cycle that often leads to more positive environments.
Manage organizational change
While we’d all like our organizations to maintain a steady course, throughout your lifetime it’s likely that your business might enter stormy waters. It could be a takeover or an economic downturn; perhaps a valued leader moves onto pastures new, working processes change or the company hits the headlines for the wrong reasons. Whatever the cause, corporate life is rarely plain sailing.
Managing these periods of change is key to the long-term success of your business. And in particular, ensuring that you protect your people from any potential impact is vital. By taking steps to assess your corporate culture you can track the impact that these events have on your employees and then course correct in real time.
Reduce turnover
By assessing corporate culture you can also help to cut the costs associated with employee turnover. That’s because the assessments provide you with actionable insight into where your business might be failing to meet employees’ expectations. Armed with this knowledge you can proactively take steps to address them before they become an issue that might lead a valued employee to leave.
Avoid costly errors
Toxic work cultures cost businesses more than just lost employees. That’s not to underestimate the impact of attrition, which can cost businesses billions every year. But there’s also a long tail of other effects that can negatively impact your organization. Things like absenteeism increase while productivity decreases. Toxic work cultures can also have a negative impact on your brand and can even influence investors.
It all adds up to bad news for your business’s bottom line, which is why keeping on top of culture is so important.
Boost your employer brand
A good culture can help you to attract good people, and lots of them. Today’s top talent aren’t looking for a big bonus or a company car, they’re looking for a great culture. In fact, 15% of candidates admit to turning down a job offer because of concerns over a company’s culture. By taking the time to regularly assess your culture performance you’re showing potential candidates how important it is for your organization, boosting your brand as an employer and gaining the edge on your competition.
Corporate culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage that is completely within the control of the entrepreneur.
– David Cummings, Co-Founder, Pardot
Recognition and Rewards: A Culture-Building Tool
After you assess your culture, taking the next step is equally as important so you can start acting on the feedback from your assessment. One of the most effective ways to develop your culture? Recognition and rewards. When employees feel appreciated—not just for what they achieve, but how they live your values—they’re more likely to stay engaged and aligned.
Tools like Bucketlist Rewards make it easy to turn recognition into habit. From celebrating milestones automatically to offering personalized rewards and peer-to-peer shoutouts, Bucketlist helps reinforce a positive culture that reflects your company’s values.
See what Bucketlist can do for you! Watch the video below and speak to an expert today!
How To Assess Your Corporate Culture
If you’re intent on assessing corporate culture then you need to put a plan into place for how you’re going to do it. The key to your success is not just to gather anecdotal evidence, but to try and source hard data and insight into how your organization is performing. There are a number of different techniques that companies use to gather this intel but the most common, and effective, is through targeted questionnaires.
The appeal of questionnaires is that they can be targeted to gather specific information on your corporate culture. But they also have an added benefit, and that’s that they create a two-way dialogue between you and your employees. By giving your people a voice, you’re showing them how much their opinions matter and reinforcing the role they can play in creating a great corporate culture.
But before we look at some greatest sample questions that you can include when assessing corporate culture, we first need to look at some of the theory behind them.
The Competing Values Framework (CVF)
Your corporate culture is as unique as you are. Some companies are successful because they’re fast and agile. Others are innovative. Some are caring and committed to their communities. While some stick steadfastly to their values and ideals and evolve over time.
As the adage goes “You can’t measure what you don’t know” – so understanding exactly what your culture is is vital when it comes to assessing whether it’s working or not. The problem is that identifying exactly what your corporate culture is can be tricky.
That’s where the Competing Values Framework (CVF) comes in.
Originally developed in the early 80s, the CVF is a framework that was developed to help organizations to identify what they value the most. It’s a deceptively simple model based on the idea that most company cultures can be defined using two competing axes that run between opposite or competing values.
What you’ll find as you begin assessing corporate culture is that your employees’ answers will begin to lean towards one of the four quadrants of the CVF. This will not only help you to locate where your current culture is at, but also the journey you will go on as you attempt to implement organizational change.
It’s a fantastic tool for quantifying something like culture, which is often difficult to put into actionable language.
The four quadrants
Each of the four quadrants of the CVF identifies different values, behaviors and ideals. Your organization’s culture will determine where you sit on the framework. So what kind of culture does each quadrant describe?
Collaborate (Clan) – Companies that fall within this quadrant value communication, loyalty and teamwork in order to succeed. Collaborate cultures are often like an extended family where employees feel a strong sense of belonging and leaders are seen as mentors rather than managers.
Examples: Zappos, Patagonia.
Compete (Market) – This quadrant contains cultures that are focused heavily on profitability and the bottom line. Competitive, results-driven and zeroed in on performance – these cultures are the polar opposite of Collaborate or Clan cultures and aim to become market leaders and are often characterized by their agility and drive.
Examples: Amazon, Apple.
Create (Adhocracy) – Focused on innovation above all else, companies with this kind of culture are typically fast-paced and experience fast growth. Employees are encouraged to think out-of-the-box and go above and beyond to come up with new products and technologies. If your company is creative, entrepreneurial and risk-taking then you probably fall into this quadrant.
Examples: Tesla, Google.
Control (Hierarchy) – Structured and process-orientated, Control or Hierarchy cultures are often found in traditional businesses that rely on designated job titles and a clear chain of command. With a heavy emphasis on order, procedure and process these organizations are often smooth-running and incredibly efficient.
Examples: Goldman Sachs, the Military.
No matter how you assess your corporate culture, the insight you will yield is immense. Hear from real organizations like Ely Bloomenson who share their experience assessing their culture, and the powerful culture initiative that came from that assessment.
Sample Questions For Assessing Corporate Culture
If you’re looking for a few ideas to help you kickstart your corporate culture assessment, here are some sample questions that you can include on your employee questionnaires to gather insightful feedback.
- Do you feel connected to the work you do?
- Are you motivated by your work?
- Do you feel a sense of purpose at work?
These types of questions are a vital indicator of how engaged your employees are and how connected they feel to your company culture. They demonstrate how strong your corporate culture is and how committed your employees are to it.
- Do you know what the company’s values are?
- Are your goals clearly aligned to the company’s values?
- Do you think management shares the same goals for the company as you do?
Connecting the dots between the corporate culture you’re hoping to achieve and the one you have in reality is an essential part of any assessment. These sample questions are designed to gauge how much your employees know about your corporate culture and how well it is being executed at all levels of your organization.
- Do you feel recognized and appreciated for your efforts?
- If you work hard and achieve success do you think your efforts will be rewarded?
- Do you think that you are rewarded for exhibiting the company’s values?
Recognition and rewards are key components of any flourishing culture. These sample questions will help to see if your programs are working and whether there are any areas that need improvement.
- Do you feel that leaders are transparent?
- Is there a clear management structure in place?
- Do you feel pressure from management to perform well?
Leaders are key to strong corporate cultures. Values, ideals and behaviors trickle down an organization and so the actions of your management team will directly impact everyone else at the company. Questions like this will help you to determine if your leaders are doing their bit to create a great corporate culture.
- Do leaders help to foster an environment where teamwork is championed?
- Do employees support each other?
- Is collaboration celebrated at the company?
If you’re looking to build a collaborative culture then these questions will show you how close you are to achieving your aims. Even if collaboration isn’t a key pillar of your plan, it’s important information that can tell you how well your people are performing as a team.
- Do you think the company supports your career development?
- Does management focus on mentoring individuals and teams?
- Does your work give you opportunities to develop new skills and experiences?
Today, employees want to feel valued and that the company they work for shares their goals. Career development is just one of the ways that you can demonstrate your commitment to them, as such it should always be included when assessing corporate culture.
- Does the company care about your wellbeing?
- Are individuals given autonomy to complete tasks in their own way?
- Is your schedule flexible enough to meet family and personal responsibilities?
These questions highlight the kind of corporate culture that so many employees are looking for these days. From flexible working practices to wellbeing support and benefits, if you want to create the kind of corporate culture that people flock to, then you’re going to want to score highly here.
- Do you feel the organization prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion?
- Do you feel like work is a safe and supportive environment?
- Are everyone’s values and perspectives taken into account?
Another piece of the culture puzzle is how your company handles issues like diversity, equity and inclusion. These are no longer “nice to haves” but essential components for any business. Supportive, open and inclusive environments have been proven to be beneficial for businesses, but they’re also crucial for employees who want to work somewhere that they can believe in.
- Do things change quickly enough at this company?
- Do you have the information and tools you need to adapt quickly to change?
- Are proper procedures and processes followed by everyone at the company?
As we saw with the Competing Values Framework (CVF), how reactive your company is to change can be a great bellwether for assessing what kind of culture your company has. In our modern age where the pace of change is rapid, knowing how adaptable your people are can also help you to navigate whatever life throws at you.
After asking these questions, if your culture assessment shows gaps in recognition, it may be time to revisit how your organization celebrates success. With Bucketlist Rewards, you can build a program that connects daily wins to your cultural values—helping employees feel valued, seen, and motivated.
The impact of our platform speaks for itself. Click here to see what real HR leaders are saying about the impact of Bucketlist at their organization:
How to Choose the Right Questions for Assessing Corporate Culture
The sample questions we’ve laid out above are a good place to start when it comes to assessing corporate culture. But when it comes to your organization it’s vital that you carefully consider the type of questions you want to ask your employees. These can’t be chosen on a whim. Instead, you need to specifically tailor your questionnaire in order to uncover the insight you need to assess your culture.
That starts with asking yourself what you’re hoping to achieve? Why are you conducting the questionnaire? What data are you hoping to gather? What are you planning to do with the findings
Armed with this knowledge you can work backwards and gear your questions towards achieving the outcomes you are looking for.
How To Leverage Your Findings
Once you’ve begun the process of assessing corporate culture your next step is to take the data you’ve collected and put it into action. So what steps should you take to transform your assessments into tangible progress?
1. Crunch the numbers
Your corporate culture assessments will provide a treasure trove of data. But that’s not the only tool you have to examine your culture. Exit interviews, employee one-to-ones and even anecdotal evidence from leadership should all be added into the mix when it comes to assessing corporate culture.
Once you’ve gathered all of this data together the next step is to collate it and analyze the findings to identify patterns as well as any strengths and weaknesses that your organization exhibits.
2. Set benchmarks
Once you’ve collated your data, be sure to set benchmarks. These will help you to set achievable goals and track your progress over time. They will also enable you to compare your efforts to best practices within the wider industry so that you can see how you compare to the rest of your sector.
3. Be honest with yourself
The thing about company cultures is that they often feel more personal than any other area of the business. There is so much emotion tied up in them, so much sentiment that can sometimes get in the way of rational decision-making. That’s why it’s so important for you to be honest with yourself when assessing corporate culture. It may be that you have an idealized vision of what your company culture looks like, only for that to be undermined by the data you receive. That can be a shock to the system, but it’s vital that you remain impartial and analyze the results based on what your people are actually telling you and not what you hoped to hear.
4. Turn insight into actions
By conducting employee surveys and taking steps to assess your corporate culture you are talking the talk, but you’ve also got to walk the walk. One of the biggest mistakes that companies make is not acting on the information they have gathered during their culture assessments. Not only is this a missed opportunity but it also sends the message to your employees that their feedback doesn’t matter, the polar opposite of what you set out to achieve in the first place.
Wrapping Up: Assessing Corporate Culture
Strong culture isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a business necessity. Organizations can’t afford to leave it to chance.
A culture assessment gives you a clear view of where your culture stands today and where it needs to go. It’s a practical first step toward building a workplace that engages employees, supports performance, and drives long-term success.
Looking for the next step? Building on the insights from that assessment with culture building initiatives like recognition programs. Bucketlist Rewards is a top recognition platform for organizations looking for scalable, accessible and easy to use recognition software that works for corporate employees and the frontline. Book a demo with us to learn more!
