Culture Is Built in the Small, Invisible Moments—and Every One of Us Helps Create It
This past weekend, I found myself in a conversation with a friend who mentioned receiving an impersonal email from an organization she has been closely connected to for many years.
She wasn't surprised to get a marketing email. Organizations send them all the time. What surprised her was her reaction to it. It became one more small reminder that somewhere along the way, she had lost the sense of community she once felt with this organization.
That led us into a much bigger conversation about how much so many of us are craving community and connection right now.
We want someone at the store we frequent to know our name. We want to have a relationship with the teachers and administrators at our kids' schools. We want to walk into a church, a neighborhood gathering, or a community event and see people who know us—and notice when we aren't there.
We want to feel that we belong somewhere.
And it turns out, we want much the same thing at work.
But here's what I kept thinking about after that conversation: We aren't just passive recipients of that feeling of connection. We help create it.
The same is true of workplace culture.
We think culture lives in the big things
When organizations talk about culture, the conversation often gravitates toward big, visible things:
The retreat. The values exercise. The employee survey. The new benefits package. The annual recognition award.
Those things matter. But they're intermittent.
Our actual experience of an organization is formed much more frequently—in the dozens of tiny interactions that happen every day.
My boss asked what I thought—and listened.
She remembered something I told her last week.
He thanked me specifically for something I did.
I disagreed in a meeting and nobody punished me for it.
I screwed something up and my manager got curious rather than angry.
Or:
Someone else got credit for my work.
I was interrupted three times and no one noticed.
My boss canceled our 1:1 again.
Individually, none of these moments defines a culture.
Collectively, they are the culture.
And here's the important part: many of these moments don't require you to be the boss.
Every one of us has opportunities to notice someone, invite a quieter colleague into a conversation, give someone credit, offer help, listen with curiosity, or check in after a difficult meeting.
We are all creating culture all the time—often without realizing we're doing it.
Culture is cumulative
Gallup reports that only 20% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they feel connected to their organization's culture. Yet employees who do feel strongly connected are 4.3 times as likely to be engaged, 47% less likely to be looking for another job, and 62% less likely to report frequent burnout.
So what creates that connection? Some of it appears to be surprisingly small.
Gallup found that employees who receive both feedback and recognition from their manager at least weekly are 61% engaged, compared with 38% of employees who receive weekly feedback but less frequent recognition.
I don't think the important lesson here is simply that organizations need better recognition programs.
It's that people want to know that someone is paying attention.
Someone finishes something difficult on a Tuesday afternoon and another person notices.
Someone contributes an idea and a colleague remembers who said it.
Someone has been struggling and another person asks, "How are you doing?"—and actually waits for the answer.
And while managers have an outsized influence on culture, noticing isn't reserved for managers.
You can be the person who sends the two-line message saying, "You did a great job with that."
You can be the person who says, "I think that was Maya's idea originally."
You can notice that someone hasn't spoken.
Culture is built in these moments.
Caring is experienced interpersonally
An organization can say it cares about its people. It can put "people first" in its values. It can create policies designed to support employee wellbeing.
But people experience care interpersonally.
Someone remembers that your mother was having surgery.
Someone notices you've been unusually quiet.
Someone asks how the presentation went.
A colleague knows what you're hoping to learn next.
Someone realizes you're overwhelmed before you have to announce it.
These interactions may take seconds. But they give us important information:
Someone is paying attention to me. And that matters.
One of Gallup's longstanding measures of employee engagement is whether someone at work "seems to care about me as a person." Another is whether employees believe their opinions count.
Gallup has estimated that if organizations increased the proportion of employees who strongly believe their opinions count from three in ten to six in ten, they could see a 27% reduction in turnover, a 40% reduction in safety incidents, and a 12% increase in productivity.
Again, think about how an employee discovers that their opinion counts.
Usually it isn't because the organization announces, "We value every voice."
It's because someone asks, "What do you think?" And listens to the answer.
Or because a colleague says, "You started to say something earlier. What were you thinking?"
Or because someone circles back the next day and says, "I've been thinking about what you said."
That's culture.
And any of us can do those things.
Connection matters, too
Work doesn't have to provide all of our friendships or our entire sense of community. But relationships at work matter more than we sometimes acknowledge.
Gallup has found that employees who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged. Its research across more than 180,000 teams has also connected strong workplace friendships with better outcomes including safety, profitability and customer engagement.
Again, those relationships aren't necessarily formed through team-building exercises. They're built in the two minutes before the Zoom call starts.
The message after a difficult meeting: "You okay?"
The colleague who offers to help without being asked.
The person who remembers something that mattered to you.
The laughter in the middle of a stressful week.
The conversation that goes slightly beyond, "How was your weekend?"
These moments are easy to dismiss because they don't look particularly productive. But they are doing something important: they're creating connection.
And perhaps instead of only asking, "Do I feel connected at work?" we can also ask, "What am I doing to create connection for the people around me?"
The negative moments accumulate, too
Of course, the reverse is also true.
Research from MIT Sloan examining more than 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews found that toxic culture was 10 times more powerful than compensation in predicting employee attrition during the Great Resignation. Among the characteristics most associated with toxic cultures were disrespect, exclusion, unethical behavior, cutthroat behavior and abusive leadership.
And those cultures aren't created overnight either.
They're built when someone gets interrupted repeatedly.
When a leader takes credit for someone else's idea.
When the same voices dominate every conversation.
When someone makes a mistake and watches the boss's face change.
When a person gets invited into the conversation—or doesn't.
When an employee raises a concern and learns that it would have been safer to stay quiet.
Every one of those interactions is another small piece of evidence about how we treat people here.
This is also where our own responsibility can get uncomfortable.
It's relatively easy to identify the things other people do that contribute to a culture we don't like. It's harder—and potentially more useful—to notice our own small behaviors.
Who do I interrupt? Whose ideas do I acknowledge? Who do I make time for? How do I respond when someone disagrees with me? What happens on my face when someone makes a mistake?
We may not control the culture around us, but we are almost always contributing something to it.
This is where values become culture
Most organizations have values. Many have invested significant time identifying exactly the right words to describe them. Some of us even look at our organization's culture statements and wonder whether they're actually being followed.
But values don't become culture because we put them on a website.
They become culture when people can see them in our behavior.
If one of our values is collaboration, what happens when someone disagrees with us?
If it's inclusion, whose perspective do we actively seek?
If it's respect, how do we respond when someone makes a mistake?
If it's wellbeing, what do we do when someone is clearly overwhelmed?
If it's community, are we helping people feel known?
This may be the part of culture-building we underestimate most.
Culture isn't only what an organization says matters. It's what people learn matters through thousands of small experiences with one another.
And over time, those experiences answer some very consequential questions:
Do I matter here?
Can I grow professionally here?
Do people notice me?
Can I be myself here?
Will someone have my back?
Is it safe to speak?
Do these people actually care about one another?
The moments that answer those questions rarely appear in a strategic plan. Nobody tracks "remembered to ask about her mother's surgery" or "noticed he hadn't spoken and invited him into the conversation" as a KPI.
But perhaps that's precisely the point.
Some of the moments that do the most to shape our culture don't look like culture-building at all.
So perhaps the question isn't simply, "What is the culture like where I work?"
It's also:
What kind of culture am I creating around me?
Who could I notice today?
Who could I make feel included?
Whose contribution could I acknowledge?
Who could I listen to a little more closely?
Where could I choose curiosity instead of judgment?
We can't single-handedly create an organization's culture. And individual acts of kindness can't compensate for genuinely unhealthy systems or leadership.
But none of us is powerless when it comes to culture.
Every day, in dozens of small and mostly invisible moments, we have a chance to help create the kind of workplace we ourselves want to experience.
We do it when we notice, connect, listen, remember and care.
And then someone else gets to experience that culture because we helped create it.