Culture assessment in a professional membership body
Moving beyond engagement scores - culture assessed through decision rights and permission, not satisfaction
A medical royal college had done everything a good employee engagement plan can do. The problem stayed where it was. So we ran an organisational culture assessment that stopped asking how people felt about work, and started examining how the work actually got done. This is what assessing the culture of a professional body found underneath its own engagement scores.
The employee engagement playbook, run properly
Like a lot of professional bodies, the College had already taken its culture seriously and acted on it. Two pulse surveys. An improvement plan with a named owner against every action. Hot desking introduced. Massages moved from fortnightly to weekly. A tree planted for every new starter.
Look at that list and the shape of it is clear enough: most of these change what surrounds a job rather than the job. That isn't a failure of effort or intent - it's what the standard playbook recommends, and the College delivered it properly, which is more than a lot of organisations manage. Plenty talk about culture and never get as far as a single action with a name against it.
The catch is that the playbook is built to improve how work feels. Nobody had asked it to change how work happened, because that isn't what it's for.
Looking underneath workload
Workload was the clearest example. It had been raised, discussed and actioned, and it had not shifted. Not because the actions were wrong, but because workload isn't produced by how people feel about their jobs. It's produced by what gets said yes to, who decides, and whether anyone is allowed to say no. Those are cultural questions, and none of them were on the plan.
The CIPD's Good Work Index makes the same connection from the other end. It treats workload, autonomy, employee voice and psychological safety as dimensions of the same thing - job quality - rather than as separate problems with separate owners. Pull them apart and workload becomes a scheduling issue. Keep them together and it becomes a question about decision rights. Reading a climate properly means reading all four together.
The College's own improvement plan records the gap without quite naming it. Against workload, someone had noted that the problem was still there despite all the talking about it - and the action logged in response was to run cultural development sessions. That entry is where this engagement starts.
It's a more unusual moment than it sounds. The common response to a problem that won't move is to run the same play again, louder. This was a decision to come at it from a different direction.
Organisational culture isn't what you add. It's how the work gets done.
This isn't an argument against environment. Where people sit, what the space is like, whether the tools work - all of that is real, and hot desking was a sensible change. Environment is part of culture.
The distinction is between additions to the work experience and the machinery of how work happens. Engagement initiatives are usually the first kind: surface-focused, well meant, often genuinely appreciated, and structurally unable to reach the second. A ping-pong table won't speed up a decision. It won't change what gets rewarded, and it won't make the job easier to do. Those are the things that produce culture.
So the culture assessment read the lived climate - the organisation beneath the organisation. Not the values on the wall, but the distance between those values and what happens on an ordinary Tuesday. Five angles, each read against what the College itself said it stood for.
Angle | What it surfaced here |
|---|---|
Integrity | Personal responsibility was named in the strategy. People weren't always comfortable taking it, and weren't certain they had the power to |
Safety | Difficult conversations were being deferred while people waited for an authority that never quite arrived |
Learning | If getting something wrong isn't safe, nobody innovates and nobody fixes anything - named directly, in the room |
Respect | Subject matter experts weren't reliably in the room when decisions in their own area were made |
Recognition | Leaders shape culture as much by what they choose to champion and acknowledge as by anything they say |
Not the mood. The machinery.
Culture on a Wednesday morning
Once the culture assessment changed its questions, the answers changed with them. Nobody talked about values.
What people described instead was the ordinary machinery of a membership organisation under pressure. Priorities arriving from nowhere. About spending the week firefighting and never reaching the strategic work everyone agreed mattered. About waiting for authority that never quite arrived. About saying yes because saying no felt impossible, and then absorbing the consequences. About change happening to them rather than with them.
That is what culture looks like on an ordinary Wednesday morning. Not a poster. A set of small, repeated experiences of how much say you have over your own work.
Three themes, and decision rights underneath all of them
Three themes came out of the assessment sessions with the executive team and the senior management team.
Theme | What people described | What it pointed to |
|---|---|---|
Decision making, reactivity and agency | Who makes decisions, who enforces them, how they get made, and the effect downstream. Real appetite for strategic work, crowded out by reactive demand. Priorities set by forces nobody could predict. | Decision rights were unclear, and invisible decision making reads as arbitrary decision making |
Empowerment and permission | People waiting for authority before making changes or having difficult conversations. A wish for employees to take the initiative, alongside uncertainty about what time, tools and backing they had. | Permission was assumed by leaders and not felt by staff |
Ambitions versus capacity | Genuine willingness to do the right thing, and to say yes to ambitious plans - together producing more work than the organisation could carry. Little confidence in saying no well. | Without an agreed basis for saying no, capacity is set by whoever asks last |
Assessed separately they look like three problems. Read together they are one: agency. Can you see how decisions get made, are you allowed to act, and do you have the room to act. Everything else followed from those three.
Eight permission questions instead of a satisfaction scale
Agency is a slippery thing to measure directly. Ask people whether they feel empowered and you get a shrug, because the word means nothing on a Tuesday. It is also the variable with the longest research history behind it: Karasek's decision latitude - how much say you have over how your own work is done - has been used to predict strain and wellbeing for four decades.
So this part of the culture assessment asked eight plain questions instead. Is there authority to:
- Challenge the status quo?
- Fix something if it isn't working?
- Make a change without seeking permission?
- Call on someone in another team directly?
- Ignore a process if there's a better way?
- Create a process if one doesn't exist?
- Say no to additional workload if it would affect quality?
- Ask why a decision was made, and challenge it?
A satisfaction scale tells you how people feel. A permission test tells you what they believe they are allowed to do - which is the thing that actually governs behaviour. The answers were not unanimous, and the disagreement was itself the finding: people in the same organisation held genuinely different beliefs about what was permitted. That gap is where good intentions stop translating into action, and it is invisible to any instrument that reports a single average.
Both of these are true: tension held rather than resolved
Handing an assessment back needs a form that doesn't flatten it, because the sharpest material here was contradictory and all of it was accurate.
We used a device we call dialectic perspectives: two statements the same group had made, set side by side and held together rather than resolved.
We want people to take more ownership of problems | We're not given the power to take ownership when it matters |
We want to focus our time on proactive, strategic plans | We spend most of our time firefighting and being reactive |
Eager to help, support and do what's right | By doing everything, we're eroding the goodwill to make it happen |
We want everyone to feel empowered to make change | Lived experience may not be one of empowerment to create change |
Neither column is the correct one. The tension between them is the thing to work on, and naming it that way meant nobody had to be wrong in order for the finding to be true.
Each theme also opened with an epigraph rather than a summary - Hamilton on the first, on people opposing a thing merely because they had no agency in planning it - and closed with three questions put to the leadership team rather than a list of recommendations. When the subject is agency, handing people conclusions is a slightly odd way to proceed.
Not a culture change programme. Fix as you go.
The obvious next move after an organisational culture assessment is a culture change programme. That would have repeated the original mistake at greater expense - another thing running alongside the work.
What we recommended instead was the least programme-shaped culture work available: building the conditions for people to fix things inside the work as they went - explicit permission, the skills to improve a process end to end, the perspective to see it whole, the authority to act, the tools, and the time and space to use them.
Alongside it, a set of deliberately unglamorous changes. Make decision making transparent, with an agreed set of questions and approaches, so decisions stop appearing from nowhere. Build what members genuinely value into a touchstone for setting priorities, so there's something to prioritise against. Better meetings - clear agenda, twenty minutes, fewer people - and a meeting amnesty to go with them. Clearer guidance on email, which came up repeatedly and looked almost too obvious to write down. One in, one out: for every new task or responsibility, an explicit agreement about what stops.
And a caveat we put at the top of our own recommendations rather than the bottom: nearly all of this needs time and headspace that people did not have. Without creating that first, none of the rest happens. A list of good ideas handed to an overloaded organisation is just more load.
Where the culture assessment led
The recommendations became a programme, and we built it from them - Culture Champions, then Culture in Action, with culture framed as everyone's job rather than a leadership initiative. Assessing the culture was never the point; it was the thing that made the next decision an informed one.
The Culture Champions brief is worth noting for what it refused to promise. Asked whether this would work, it said plainly that nobody knew, and that it would only work if the people doing it drove it. Asked whether it would be easy, it said unlikely. It was also written to filter volunteers out rather than maximise sign-ups, on the grounds that the wrong champions are worse than fewer.
The Culture in Action proposal named its own risks up front, including the one that undoes most culture work: that culture becomes everything, and stops having any definable outcome at all.
The reframe then travelled further than the programme. The College's own people and operations strategy set out to redefine employee engagement around impact, and rethought what its employee forum was for - moving it from a body that gathered feedback towards one with a remit to change things, with the culture research named as the reason. A separate strand identified the absence of a feedback process tied to the business cycle and to when decisions actually get made.
That is the outcome that matters. Not a score that moved, but a change in what a governing body is for.
The ambition it was all in service of
The executive team set out what they were aiming at before any of this started: to be a cultural role model for how things can be, and in turn to influence the culture of the NHS for the better.
That is the reason a culture assessment was worth doing here at all. Not an organisation in trouble, but a professional body that had already done the easy things and was willing to look at the harder ones.
Why surface improvements don't last
Perks, recognition, a better space, massages moved to weekly - these do something real. They improve the general experience of work, and people notice. Nothing here says otherwise, and the College was right to do them.
What they can't do is remove friction. If the underlying way work happens is producing it - decisions arriving without explanation, permission that has to be waited for, new work arriving with nothing leaving - then the friction keeps generating the same experience, day after day, faster than the improvements can offset it. That is why the effect fades rather than fails outright. Something genuinely gets better, and then the machinery underneath reasserts itself and the ground is retaken.
It is also why an engagement survey can be answered honestly and still point at the wrong thing. It records the symptom faithfully - stress, communication, workload - and has no way of naming what produced it. Act on the symptom and you get improvements that need doing again next year.
This is the difference between working on the surface and working with the organisation beneath the organisation: the practices, routines and unwritten rules that decide how an ordinary Wednesday actually goes. The surface is where the experience is felt. Underneath is where it gets made. Both matter, but only one of them determines whether a change holds.
So the transferable test is about durability rather than effort. If an improvement fades, the friction underneath is still there. Adding more improvements will buy another few months. Removing the friction is what makes any of them last - which is why the recommendation here was capability inside the work rather than another programme running alongside it.
About this work
James Freeman-Gray was the consultant on this engagement. He ran the sessions with the executive and senior management teams, built the assessment instrument, and developed the programme that followed from the recommendations.
The client is not named here at their preference. See more of our work in culture change.
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