Summary: Culture drives performance and retention, yet most organisations struggle to embed it. Traditional methods like training and posters rarely translate into actual behaviour change. AI tools can now observe micro-interactions in real time, delivering personalised behavioural nudges in the flow of work aligned to your company values. This makes culture change actionable and measurable for the first time. Leaders can gain visibility into what’s working and where to focus effort, transforming culture from aspiration into embedded behaviour at scale.
When leaders say that culture eats strategy for breakfast, people nod. Yet ask any People Team how to actually embed their desired culture and you will usually get a sigh. Organisations spend huge amounts of time working out the culture they have and defining the culture they want. The hard part is closing the gap.
Posters on walls do not turn into real behaviour. One company told us they even increased the font size and nothing changed, which should not surprise anyone! Training programmes also only go so far. Most learning gets forgotten and, in truth, many colleagues cannot even recall their company values.
Culture is not a nice to have
This matters because culture is business critical. During the Great Resignation of 2022, MIT Sloan Management Review found that a toxic culture was ten times more predictive of attrition than pay. It was the strongest driver of people leaving. When culture is working, on the other hand, the uplift is enormous. Gartner reports that embedding culture into daily work increases employee performance by 34% and employee engagement by 63%. Culture is both a feeling and a line item. Everyone wins when it works and everyone loses when it does not.
But the culture you need does not appear simply because you want it to. Culture is how people actually behave in the thousands of small moments that make up daily work. The Monday stand-up, the late-night email, the manager giving feedback under pressure, the quick back and forth in a project. These micro-interactions create a company’s real culture. Having a value on the wall saying “we are innovative” does not make people innovative. Innovative behaviour in the flow of work does.
A recent HBR cross-national study found that 59% of employees saw senior leaders contradict stated values weekly, and other research from MIT Sloan has shown the correlation between a company’s stated values and their actual values to be zero (or sometimes even negative!).
Most transformations don’t fail due to poor communication of goals. They fail because the organisation hasn’t changed how colleagues interact and make decisions in the workflow moments where culture is actually defined.
How companies try to solve the problem
Organisations have traditionally tried a range of solutions. Coaching can deliver strong results, but is not scalable and often not affordable at the scale required. Managers can coach, but many do not have the time or skills required to do so. Workshops and development programmes help, but no one recalls six-month-old training when writing a Tuesday-morning email.
On top of this, even when some behaviours start to embed, companies rarely know which ones are landing well and which are not. The same uncertainty appears across departments and regions. This makes it hard for companies to know where they require further embedding effort.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Transformation is hard and indeed about 70% fail. It is especially difficult when the change required is in the micro interactions that have always been invisible and almost impossible to shape. Until now.
Using AI to solve the problem
If culture lives in everyday behaviour, the question is whether AI allows us to support people in those everyday moments and guide them to be the best version of themselves, as inspired by their company values.
Some AI tools can now observe behaviour in the natural flow of work. It can observe and analyse what was previously (in practice) invisible to the company – the thousands of micro-interactions taking place as they happen across multiple digital communication channels all the time.
Having access to these micro-interactions, AI tools can now deliver in-the-moment behavioural nudges inside the tools colleagues are already using, without even asking them to switch apps. And, critically, these nudges can be linked back to the specific values, behaviours and ‘ways of working’ that have been prioritised by each specific company.
This has an immediate and scalable impact. It embeds culture (not just any culture, but the company’s specific culture) whilst improving individual performance, and translating values into clear behaviours, actions, and habits – not just words on the wall. And it does this without diminishing each colleague’s voice, personality and style.
In addition to shaping behaviours as they happen, by tracking real behavioural patterns across the organisation these AI tools can provide people leaders with culture and behaviour change metrics tied to areas like accountability, innovation, and customer centricity. For the first time, leaders can see which cultural elements are strong and which need more attention.
AI for transformation versus AI for automation
This is the difference between using AI for transformation and AI for automation. AI automation makes what you already do faster and more efficient. AI transformation tools, on the other hand, change what you’re able to do in the first place, making work fundamentally different, and solving previously insoluble problems – embedding culture at scale being a good example.
One note of caution: any AI solution must keep user and company privacy at its core. The purpose is not employee surveillance, but to help managers and teams develop while ensuring that the company’s values and behaviours appear in real work and decisions.
Bottom line
AI can now give organisations the ability to transform how people work. It can make good choices easier in the moment. It can turn the invisible into something visible. It can give people teams precision instead of guesswork.
Culture has always mattered. The difference now is that we can finally shape and measure it based on what truly drives it – the countless everyday behaviours and micro interactions across your company.
Key takeaways
If you’re ready to move culture from aspiration to action, consider these steps:
- Identify your culture gap. Map the difference between your stated values and actual daily behaviours across teams.
- Look beyond traditional methods. Coaching and training have limits – explore AI tools that shape behaviour in real-time workflow moments.
- Make culture change measurable. Track which behaviours are embedding well and where you need further targeted intervention.
- Prioritise privacy and trust. Any AI solution must support development, not surveillance, keeping employee wellbeing central to your approach.
Visit sculture.ai to learn more.
