“We don’t have a team culture”
I’ve heard people say this about their team.
But I quickly understood they meant that they didn’t feel connected to their colleagues or have any sense of social activity.
When people say that they don’t have a team culture, it comes down to a few misconceptions about what it really is.
Firstly, they’re conflating culture with “vibes” — the intangible, buzzy feeling people get when good relationships naturally gel. This feeling is great when it happens, but it’s not always guaranteed.
Secondly, they’re assuming that culture is only about cohesion. It’s important, but it’s not the only factor. “Cohesion” is just one of the pillars on Bracket’s five-pillar framework (alignment, cohesion, communication, design and change).
Every team has a culture, whether they are aware of it or not. In fact, for the people who say they don’t have one, the lack of cohesion is a feature of their culture.
Team culture shows up in many places — in meetings, in the channels a team uses to communicate, in how they share information, in how well they know each other’s working styles, and in how they problem-solve together and make decisions.
All of these elements can emerge naturally and therefore feel undefined. Or, they can be intentionally designed to make sure they provide necessary structure and direction. And when culture is intentional, it brings an element of consistency to how team members experience the culture.
Does everyone experience your team culture the same way?
When we run our team culture diagnostic, it includes an anonymous survey for every team member to take. Each respondent rates a series of statements, based on our framework, on a scale of 1-5.
We ask them to assess statements like:
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We have a clear vision and clear goals as a team.
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I feel trusted to do my work in the way I know best.
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I feel comfortable productively challenging others’ views on the team.
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I am up-to-date with the information I need to do my work effectively.
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We have regular conversations about how we work together as a team.
When all the results are in, we review three areas to help us identify a team’s strengths and opportunity areas so that we can start to build their development journey: 1) the average score for each pillar, 2) the average score for each statement and 3) the overall average team culture score.
However, there’s also something else we look out for — the spread of scores across each statement.
If a statement has scores concentrated across two, maybe three, points, whether higher or lower along the scale, that tells us that team members are mainly aligned in their perception of that area.
But if the scores spread across the whole scale from 1 to 5, it tells us that team members may view their culture very differently. And where perceptions vary that widely, there is rarely a strong culture that connects the team.
So when we start work with a team that has these kinds of results, it’s not just about improving scores overall. We also want them to become more concentrated so that we’re moving towards a more consistent experience of the culture for everyone.
Consistency, not conformity
The aim of creating a consistent culture experience is not for everyone to conform or to force people into rigid ways of working — a good culture is designed with the diversity of a team in mind. It’s to ensure that everyone has access to the same experience by increasing transparency and reducing ambiguity.
Of course, you won’t have any control over individual responses — this is still deeply personal — and you may still have outliers where the culture is perceived as better or worse than the majority.
But a culture designed with intention will mean that you’ll be able to spot these more easily and notice that there may be some people who are feeling disconnected or disengaged, maybe even excluded. It will give you clearer information about what you might need tweak or improve to keep bringing that experience into more alignment.
This becomes even more important if you have a hybrid team — some people in-office, some remote — where you need to pay more attention to those team members who are working remotely.
What designing for culture consistency looks like
Designing for consistency means building clarity and articulating the culture, both current and desired so that you can define goals, behaviours, ways of working, systems and structures that will enable your team, within its specific context, to operate at its best.
This involves understanding the needs of the individuals, the work the team does and the environment it works within to explore what can be put in place to support everyone to thrive.
Things like:
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A shared understanding of the team’s identity, purpose and goals, with values or working principles that translate into daily behaviours — a sense of what makes the team unique
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Well-designed meetings and a meeting cadence — formats for meetings that are purposeful, interactive and productive, and scheduled intentionally to support the work that needs to get done
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Defined communication methods so that team members have the right forums to share and access the information they need to stay informed and make progress.
These may sound simple, but they go a long way to building a common understanding and feeling of belonging, even more so when these elements are co-created together as a team.
This clarity brings a sense of stability and familiarity, especially when a team is experiencing a lot of change. Having these foundations in place makes it easier to evolve and tweak them as necessary.
What else would make sense for your team?
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What creates a strong sense of team culture isn’t just the social events or the good vibes — it’s the everyday practices built into the work itself, like check-ins, team reflections, and regular meetings. When these are intentional and consistent, connection comes as a result. Social activity becomes a by-product of a strong culture, not what you’re relying on to create it.
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