Culture assessment in a professional membership body
Culture assessed through decision rights, permission and how work really happens
How 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.
Why culture assessment needs more than the employee engagement playbook
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.
Despite this, engagement and satisfaction had stalled, and the college was looking for a new perspective.
If you take a look at the list of interventions, the answer might become clear. Most of these changes focused on what surrounded a job rather than the work itself. That isn't a failure of effort or intent - it's what the standard playbook recommends, and the College delivered it properly.
The catch is that the playbook is built to work around the edges of the work, rather than address the work itself.
Looking beyond the obvious to the triggers underneath
Workload was the clearest example. It had been raised, discussed and actioned, and it had not shifted. Not because any action was 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.
That’s where this engagement started - the College wanted to move beyond the surface level interventions and begin to address the underlying challenges with how work happened.
Our approach to culture change was a good fit because it looks at the practical aspects of culture, the factors that influence how work gets done and the underlying assumptions that create a work environment.
Organisational culture isn't what you add. It's how the work gets done.
This isn't an argument against smaller interventions. Where people sit, what the space is like, whether the tools work - all of that is real, and hot desking was a sensible change. These are part of culture, but they really don’t influence culture in the same way.
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 alter the latter. 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.
Our culture assessment reads 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 is what happens on a Wednesday morning
Our culture assessment changed the questions being asked, and with that the answers changed too. Nobody talked about values.
What people described instead was the ordinary machinery of a membership organisation under pressure. Priorities arriving from nowhere. Spending the week firefighting and never reaching the strategic work everyone agreed mattered. Waiting for authority that never quite arrived. Saying yes because saying no felt impossible, and then absorbing the consequences. 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. But read them together and they have a common theme: agency. Can you see how decisions get made, are you allowed to act, and do you have the room to act.
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’s also sadly been devalued over the years through overuse without substantial follow-through. But it’s also an area with a long 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.
Both of these are true: tension held rather than resolved
With any assessment instrument, you’ll often find feedback that seems contradictory. Leadership teams that are sure they’ve empowered teams to act, while teams feel constrained. Decision rights that are clear, while no one is clear who should make the decisions.
The reality is, both these views can be true at the same time.
We used a device we call dialectic perspectives to analyse these “contradictions”: comparing statements from different groups to uncover the shared truth or uncomfortable realities that have created them.
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 where the most powerful insight can often be found. Nobody has 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, but an iterative cycle of improvement.
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 continuous improvement cycle, and we built it from them - Change Champions, then Culture in Action, with work culture framed as everyone's job rather than a leadership initiative. Assessing the culture was never the point; it was what made the next decision an informed one.
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.
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 shift culture for long
Perks, recognition, a better space, massages available weekly - these things improve the general experience of work. Nothing here says otherwise, and the College was right to do them.
What these interventions 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 things regress.
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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