How To Build A Positive Company Culture - Advice from Experts

Company culture is just a collection of behaviors. Therefore, a company’s influence on culture is only as strong as its influence on behavior. So how does a company help build a positive company culture?

We’ve had a chat with the industry experts with over 5 years of experience to help you build a positive company culture. Let’s check what experts say!

Key takeaways

• A positive company culture is built through repeated behavior, not slogans, office perks or one-off team events.
• The fastest practical starting point is one observable behavior, such as managers closing the loop on employee feedback or inviting dissent before a decision.
• Culture becomes credible when hiring, onboarding, performance reviews, recognition, promotions and conduct standards reward the same values.
• Gallup’s 2026 employee engagement research reports that only 27% of employees strongly agree their opinions count at work, while 52% are actively looking or watching for another job. Build a reliable employee voice system before adding more perks.
• For hybrid teams, use shared routines, clear decision records, manager one-to-ones and inclusive meeting rules to create connection without forcing constant office attendance.
• Track culture with leading signals such as psychological safety, manager follow-through, feedback response time and role clarity, then pair them with lagging signals such as regrettable turnover and absenteeism.

How to build a positive company culture in 2026: the answer first

The most reliable approach is to choose three to five behaviors that describe how work should happen, make managers model them, and connect them to the employee lifecycle. Start with a short listening exercise, select one high-impact behavior to improve, test it in one team for 30 days, and publish what changed. This turns company culture from a poster into an operating system that employees can experience and evaluate.

That answer reflects a gap in many current search results. Most competitor guides list values, recognition, communication and psychological safety, but fewer explain how to connect those ideas to hiring decisions, manager routines, escalation and measurable outcomes. A useful positive workplace culture framework therefore needs four layers:

Employee engagement is a culture signal, not the whole culture

Gallup’s Employee Engagement Strategies for 2026 reports that fewer than one in five US employees, 18%, are extremely satisfied with their employer as a place to work, and 52% are actively looking or keeping an eye out for job openings. Only 49% strongly agree that they know what is expected of them, 31% feel connected to their organization’s mission or purpose, and 27% believe their opinions count at work. These figures are not a diagnosis of every company, but they are a useful warning against treating engagement as a perk problem.

Gallup also reports that the manager or team leader accounts for 70% of the variance in team-level engagement. That makes manager capability a culture lever. Train managers to set expectations, ask for dissent, recognize specific contributions, explain decisions and close feedback loops. A company-wide values campaign cannot compensate for a team whose manager behaves inconsistently.

A practical positive workplace culture playbook

Use this sequence to turn the expert advice in this article into an action plan:

1. Define observable behaviors. Rewrite each value as a behavior that a new employee could see in a meeting. For example, “transparency” becomes “explain the decision, owner and next review date.”
2. Listen before prescribing. Combine a short anonymous pulse survey with manager interviews and a review of turnover, absence, promotion and candidate feedback. Segment results by team, tenure and work arrangement where the sample is large enough to protect confidentiality.
3. Choose one high-impact behavior. The HBR article by James Elfer, Siri Chilazi and Edward Chang, To Change Company Culture, Start with One High-Impact Behavior, argues that information and training alone often do not change workplace behavior. Make the desired behavior easy, visible and reinforced in the workflow.
4. Give managers a weekly routine. Use one-to-ones for expectations, obstacles, development and follow-up. Keep recognition specific and fair. Record commitments so that employee voice does not disappear after the meeting.
5. Connect culture to hiring and onboarding. Use structured interview questions and a scorecard for values-related behaviors. During onboarding, show new hires how decisions are made, how concerns are raised and how feedback is acted on. See Recooty’s employee onboarding guide and process for the process layer.
6. Review and publish the learning. After 30 days, share the behavior tested, what employees noticed, what did not work and the next adjustment. Trust grows when leaders demonstrate that feedback has consequences.

What the current competitor results miss

The practical connection is between culture advice and operating evidence. Use the table below as a monthly review rather than a one-time culture checklist:

SHRM’s 2026 toolkit on building and sustaining a positive workplace culture makes a similar operational point: culture is shaped by daily behavior, procedures and decisions, not by formal announcements alone. It specifically connects culture to hiring standards, performance management, development, rewards, policy enforcement and governance. That is why culture work should have an owner, a review cadence and an escalation path.

Expert viewpoints to apply, with a 2026 update

• The experts quoted in this article point to recognition, mandatory one-to-ones, empathy during hardship, permission to experiment and employee feedback. Their ideas remain useful when translated into repeatable routines rather than isolated benefits.
• CIPD guest author David R Blackburn describes trust and empowerment as practical leadership capabilities, not soft extras. His 2026 guidance on future-focused leadership recommends ethical consistency, clear expectations, autonomy and meaningful employee voice.
• SHRM’s guidance adds an important accountability test: culture is not credible when leaders are measured only on financial or growth outcomes. Behavioral expectations should also appear in leadership evaluation, promotion and recognition.
• Our editorial view: a free lunch can improve a day, but predictable fairness improves the employee experience. If a company must choose between another perk and better manager follow-through, choose the behavior employees experience every week.

For practical examples, compare this article with 5 ways to build an extraordinary team culture, how to build a positive work culture for remote teams and employee engagement surveys: all you need to know. Use the employee value proposition guide when you need to align the internal employee experience with the promise made to candidates.

Frequently Asked Questions

01Christoph Seitz (Co-Owner, CFR Rinkens)

We focus on improving company culture in a number of ways, and we are always trying to improve our employee’s work environment. One of the best things we’ve done is to create a new position called the “Director of Happiness”. The main goal of this position is to increase engagement from employees and to enhance our company’s culture. We focus on identifying the core values we want our company to align with. We also support transparency and display recognition for reaching goals on a large screen that is in the center of our office for everyone to see. In addition, we celebrate birthdays with catered lunches and hand out team member of the month awards with a value of $500. Also, we set up a monthly meeting where we recognize the success of each section of the company, which is followed by free lunch and games. We’re positive that this leads to happy employees and better company culture. 

02Jack Wight (CEO & Owner, Buyback Boss)

One of the most important things we use in our management structure is mandatory one on one meetings between each direct report and their manager. These meetings are used to check-in on every team member, and make sure they are happy. While these meetings are also used to provide updates, the primary purpose of them is to foster positive relationships between every team member and their direct manager. Once we implemented these meetings, it had a dramatic positive effect on our team’s culture as a whole.

03Ruben Navarrete (Founder & CEO, EmpowerPoints)

Building a positive company culture isn’t always about acknowledging the positive aspects of any given culture. Team-building outings, gift cards, parties, and free food often miss the mark in subtle ways. We have learned as we have worked with dozens of companies, that how a company handles hardship, struggle, disappointment, and grief are where the deeper connections with employees are found. If a co-worker loses a loved one and the company and co-workers respond in a loving and caring way, this will be remembered more and have a deeper impact. If the business suffers a setback and offers the employees a way to sacrifice to recover, this will do more to build a positive culture than a team-building outing. Rewards, recognition and team building are important, but acknowledging the disappointments and unexpected setbacks of the human experience are equally important.   

04Huib Maat (Sales & Marketing Manager, in-House Perfumer, Pairfum)

We have found that Creativity only flourishes in a culture that encourages ‘trial & error’, where people are happy to propose something new without fear of criticism and where a positive culture of ‘can do’ pervades everywhere. One of the most effective ways to eliminate ‘thoughtless criticism’ is that we have banned the word “but” from our company. This simple rule forces everybody to think much harder about their responses and we have found since that our team is much more willing to put crazy ideas on the table.

05Vivek Kumar (Founder & CEO, Qlicket)

The beginning, middle, and end of building a positive company culture is employee feedback. This applies for our customers, who come to us with a desire to boost retention by giving employees a voice, and for our own enterprise, which always functions best when our employees are heard. The positive ramifications of listening to employees extend far beyond simply understanding workers’ pain points and addressing them. Research has repeatedly proven that building feedback systems into a company’s functions result in a “positive feedback culture,” in which employees seek constructive criticism about their work. As we have learned, employee feedback is important for all businesses—whether they are blue-collar warehouses or white-collar startups.

Hope this helps