If your team is feeling stuck or needs a fresh perspective, a culture reset could be what you need to boost energy and get a sense of a new start.
It used to be that an annual away day gave us the momentum to set goals, align, and keep our teams on track. But in today’s fast-changing world, once a year is no longer enough. Goals can become outdated in months.
We’re facing more uncertainty and complexity and dealing with more information. This can cause us to become overwhelmed, impacting our mental bandwidth and decision-making.
So, to maintain high performance with all of this happening, we need to work more iteratively and interact differently. The best teams remain relevant and adaptable by intentionally and periodically reviewing what’s happening in their external environment, checking in on each other, and updating their ways of working to match.
A team culture reset means coming together to review existing goals or create new ones and setting yourselves up so that you can achieve them. You might explore how you communicate, update meeting formats and their frequency, clarify the information you need to share and how you share it, and tap into each other’s expertise for better collaboration.
A team culture reset is more than an away day
When a leader wants to address their team culture, one of the first options they often consider is organising a workshop or an away day. This makes perfect sense – to improve how your team works together, you need to get together to discuss it.
A well-facilitated away day is great. Everyone is away from the distraction of their task list, and in a less-pressured environment, everyone opens up. Communicate flows, and you can spend time getting to know each other and thinking creatively about the future. It’s a good start.
But while you might feel good about the day you’ve spent together, the real change begins when you’re back at your desks and in the reality of your daily work.
Will your ideas for better communication and collaboration stand the test of time when you’ve got an inbox full of emails to get through, you’re in back-to-back meetings, and you’re addressing urgent issues? In a flash, your culture goals can fade into the background and drop to the bottom of the list.
If you want to reset your culture in response to challenges or opportunities you face and make real changes, you need to 1) pinpoint what you most need to improve, 2) shift the dial in those places first, and 3) have a longer-term plan for ongoing improvements.
So you’ll need a structured process for following up, keeping people accountable and measuring progress. This starts before your away day even takes place and continues long after.
When to run a team culture reset
The start of the calendar or financial year is a good time to reset your team culture alongside business goals, but there are other times it might be useful:
- After a period of change or uncertainty – to help your team adjust and recalibrate
- When launching a new strategy or direction – to align on how it impacts your work
- If you’ve had a lot of team changes, such as people leaving or joining – to rebuild cohesion
Even if none of the above apply, you might notice other signs that a reset could be valuable. Perhaps you’re sensing low morale, a dip in productivity or performance, or increasing conflicts or frustrations between team members. These all indicate a good time to pause, reflect and chart a new way forward.
Investing the time and resources in a culture reset helps to future-proof your team. You’ll have more alignment, motivation, and clarity, and it will be a key touchpoint in your ongoing team culture journey. It will reinforce the value of being proactive about how you work together.
How to run a team culture reset
A team culture reset provides the space and time to acknowledge the past and reflect on your shared experience – even if it was challenging – while planning for the future. You can assess what’s worked and what you’d like to change, explore your current situation and make renewed commitments.
A workshop is a key event in this process, but the stages before and after are just as important.
Preparation
Identify a few key areas that are the most important to address in your team culture. You can do this by gathering input from your team through conversations, polls, or surveys (we do this through 1:1 interviews with each team member and a diagnostic based on our five-pillar framework). The aim is to get a snapshot of your current culture and highlight areas with the most opportunity for improvement.
Then, set a clear purpose for your workshop and what you want to achieve. This will ensure your discussions are structured and outcome-focused.
From there, build your workshop outline. You can use this template to start structuring your session.
The workshop
Make sure you have some clear goals for your session. These could be:
- Reviewing or creating team values so expectations are clear and accountability is built-in
- Discussing working styles and communication patterns to improve understanding and cohesion
- Reviewing meetings to bring more energy and focus to your time together
- Designing new routines and rituals that keep your team productive and engaged.
During your workshop, aim for an inclusive and honest discussion. Ensure that everyone can contribute in co-creating your plan. Incorporate individual reflection time, small group discussions and brainstorming, full team sharing and allocate good time to make commitments and discuss your next steps.
Follow-up
Consistent follow-up ensures your workshop doesn’t become a “set and forget” exercise. Resetting your team culture isn’t about a single moment. The real impact comes from building this into how you work. Don’t try to achieve too much too soon. Instead, aim to integrate small, meaningful shifts into your regular working methods.
Remind everyone of their agreed actions and commitments soon within a few days following the session (ideally the day after) to keep them fresh in everyone’s minds.
Continue to revisit your plan during meetings to reinforce accountability and work through any blockers your team is experiencing. Review your original goals from your team culture snapshot and measure your progress to stay on track.
What to expect from your team culture reset
When we work with teams to reset their culture, our benchmark is a 10% improvement in their culture over six months. This is a sustainable shift that sets up the team for ongoing development.
One team we worked with created new values, which they used to prioritise and streamline their work programmes. This reduced their workload and increased the impact they were able to make.
Another client team realised that, in their weekly meetings, they were mainly reacting to urgent client problems. So, they introduced a new monthly format focusing on more strategic discussions so they could also plan for the future.
A 10% improvement could mean:
- A valued team member stays, saving the time and costs of recruitment
- Hitting goals and targets that lead to more visibility and recognition for your team
- Improved collaboration that reduces duplication and increases efficiency
- Better knowledge sharing to spark new ideas and projects.
At the right time, a team culture reset can give your team the clarity, focus and energy to get back on track and help you future-proof yourselves for a constantly changing environment.
Learn more about our Team Reset or book a call to discuss how we can help your team.