Values on the wall, an annual offsite, a charter signed by the leadership team. Many companies believe they have a culture because they have written one down. The data tells a different story, and it is far more interesting than the usual talk about company culture.
Advertised values predict nothing
This is the most uncomfortable finding in the research. Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales published a study in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2015 that crosses two sources: the values advertised on the websites of the 500 companies in the S&P 500, and a large employee survey covering 679 companies, 1,367 firm-year observations and close to 450,000 employees.
Their conclusion: proclaimed values such as innovation, integrity or respect show no measurable link with financial performance. No significant correlation with profitability or valuation.
One thing does strongly predict performance: perceived integrity, measured through a simple question, does management's behaviour match its words? When that perception rises by one standard deviation, company valuation rises by 0.19 standard deviation and profitability by 0.09. Those companies also attract more job applicants.
In other words, what matters is not what you write on the wall. It is the gap between that wall and what your teams live every day.
What culture actually changes, in numbers
Gallup has measured the link between employee engagement and business results for over twenty years. The eleventh edition of its Q12 meta-analysis, published in May 2024, aggregates 736 studies, 183,806 business units, 90 countries and more than 3.3 million employees. It is probably the most solid dataset available on the subject.
It compares work units in the top quartile of engagement with those in the bottom quartile. The median differences:
- Absenteeism: 78% lower
- Turnover: 51% lower in low-turnover organisations, 21% lower in high-turnover ones
- Safety incidents: 63% lower
- Quality defects: 32% lower
- Profitability: 23% higher
- Sales productivity: 18% higher
- Employee wellbeing: 70% higher
- Organisational citizenship behaviour: 22% higher
These gaps are not consultant promises. They are measured on real work units, in real companies, across two decades.
The engagement gap is widening
Gallup's latest global figures put employee engagement at 20% worldwide in 2025. Europe remains the least engaged region on the planet, at 12%.
We see two reasons behind those numbers, and the second is rarely named. The first has to do with working conditions and how work is organised. The second is a cultural habit: we know how to say what is wrong, far less how to say what is going well. Compliments feel awkward, thanks feel suspicious, and silence becomes the default. We unpack that mechanism in our guide on the lack of recognition at work.
Culture is built in everyday gestures
If advertised values predict nothing and perceived integrity predicts a great deal, the practical consequence is clear. A culture is not decreed in a charter. It is built through the repetition of small signals: how a mistake is received, how a success is named, how disagreement is handled in a meeting.
Among those signals, recognition at work is the most frequent and the least expensive. It happens every day, everyone can see it, and it says very concretely what the organisation values. A company where thanks circulate sends a stronger message than any poster.
The catch is that few people know how to do it well. Our analysis of the messages exchanged on the Listen Leon platform shows that genuine recognition, the kind that names a specific action, its effect, and the strength of the person behind it, is the rarest of the four levels. Next come appreciation, then kindness and compliments, then plain politeness. We call this the inverted pyramid of recognition: the base is wide, the top is rare, and the top is what produces the effect.
Four concrete levers to build a culture
- Make recognition possible at any moment. Face-to-face awkwardness is a real brake. A written channel removes it and lets anyone say thank you when the thought occurs, not only at the annual review.
- Train your teams to recognise. Effective recognition is a skill, like feedback. It is the missing pillar of management in many organisations, and the purpose of our recognition training.
- Open recognition beyond colleagues. Customers, patients, residents and families often want to say thank you and have no way to do it. That is the principle behind our 360° recognition platform, and messages from outside land particularly hard.
- Measure it. A culture that is not measured is merely narrated. eNPS and the volume and quality of messages exchanged give you a simple baseline to track over time.
The real risk: a poster contradicted by daily life
Back to Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales. Their work does not say values are useless. It says values do nothing until employees can see that they are kept. A company that advertises "care" and leaves its teams without feedback for twelve months damages its culture more than a company that advertises nothing at all.
This is also why an annual offsite is not enough. It creates a memory, not a culture. What makes the difference is the rituals held all year round, and the evidence behind them is set out in our guide to the science of recognition.
If you are looking for a concrete starting point, the Positive Team Challenge gets the dynamic going in a few days: everyone secretly writes thank-you messages to colleagues, and all of them are delivered on the same day. What happens in the following months is where a culture is actually built.
Sources
- Guiso, L., Sapienza, P., & Zingales, L. (2015). The value of corporate culture. Journal of Financial Economics, 117(1), 60-76.
- Gallup (2024). Q12 Meta-Analysis, 11th edition: 736 studies, 183,806 business units, 90 countries, 3,354,784 employees.
- Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2025 data.
- Listen Leon internal analysis of messages exchanged on the platform.