There’s an elephant in every conference room, and it’s time someone pointed it out: corporate culture is mostly performance art for executives who’ve consumed one too many LinkedIn thought leadership posts. Here’s the uncomfortable truth when it comes to company culture, there is really nothing cultural in it by itself at all.
I recently came across yet another company memo about culture this one lamenting how remote work is supposedly destroying the magical “energy” and “spontaneous moments” that make a workplace special. The usual suspects were there: hallway conversations, shared excitement, the ineffable sense of belonging that apparently only happens when people share physical space.
And I couldn’t help but think: who is this actually for?
How We Got Here: A Brief History of the Culture Obsession
The corporate culture phenomenon didn’t emerge from nowhere. To understand why every company now has a Chief Culture Officer and a dedicated culture budget, we need to look back at how this obsession began.
The 1980s: Culture as Competitive Advantage
The modern corporate culture movement can be traced back to the early 1980s, particularly to two influential books: “In Search of Excellence” (1982) by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, and “Corporate Cultures” (1982) by Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy. These books emerged during a time when American companies were losing ground to Japanese competitors, and consultants were desperately searching for explanations.
The answer they landed on was culture. Japanese companies supposedly had superior cultures strong shared values, intense loyalty, collective purpose. American companies needed to cultivate similar cultures to compete. Culture became a management tool, something to be engineered and optimized like any other business process.
The 1990s-2000s: The Silicon Valley Mythos
Then came Silicon Valley, and culture took on a new dimension. Tech companies weren’t just selling products they were selling a lifestyle, a vision, a revolution. Culture became part of the brand, both for recruiting and for public image.
Google famously codified this with its “Don’t be evil” motto and its emphasis on perks: free food, massage rooms, game areas. The message was clear: this isn’t just a job, it’s a community. Facebook followed with its “move fast and break things” ethos. Apple cultivated an air of creative excellence and secrecy.
But here’s what really happened: these companies used culture as a substitute for work-life balance. Free dinner wasn’t a perk it was an incentive to stay at the office until 9 PM. The ping-pong table wasn’t about fun it was about keeping you on campus. The mission-driven culture wasn’t about meaning it was about getting you to work 80-hour weeks for below-market equity.
The 2010s: Culture Goes Mainstream
By the 2010s, every company wanted to be the next Google. Corporate culture became an industry. LinkedIn filled with posts about culture. Business schools taught it. Consultants sold it. HR departments built entire teams around it.
Netflix released its famous culture deck in 2009, which has been viewed millions of times. Zappos made headlines by paying people to quit if they didn’t fit the culture. HubSpot, Spotify, Airbnb every successful tech company published their culture code, and traditional companies scrambled to copy them.
The irony? Most of these companies were successful despite their culture obsession, not because of it. They succeeded because they built products people wanted, captured market opportunities at the right time, or benefited from network effects. The culture was window dressing.
The Etymology Betrays the Problem
Here’s where we need to address the fundamental linguistic sleight of hand. When we talk about “company culture,” we’re borrowing a word culture that has deep anthropological and sociological meaning. Real culture emerges organically from shared history, values, traditions, and collective experience. It evolves over generations. It’s authentic and lived, not designed and mandated.
Corporate culture, by contrast, is manufactured. It’s decided in boardrooms, written into documents, and rolled out through internal communications. It’s not emergent it’s imposed. It’s not organic it’s engineered. When it comes to company culture, there is really nothing cultural in it by itself at all. It’s just management strategy dressed up in anthropological language.
Real culture the kind anthropologists study comes from the bottom up. Corporate culture comes from the top down. Real culture reflects genuine shared values. Corporate culture reflects what leadership wants people to value. These are fundamentally different things, but we use the same word for both, and that confusion serves the interests of management.
The Culture Industry and Its Empty Promises
Walk into any modern company and you’ll witness the same elaborate theater. Mission statements are plastered across reception walls in carefully chosen fonts. Core values are printed on branded notebooks that nobody opens. There are Slack channels dedicated to “living our culture,” all-hands meetings where leadership delivers inspiring speeches about shared purpose, and mandatory workshops on belonging.
The culture machinery churns constantly, producing engagement surveys, team-building exercises, and culture decks that get shared on social media as proof of how progressive and human-centered the organization is.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody in the C-suite wants to acknowledge: most employees don’t actually care about any of this.
They care about their work. They care about their paycheck. They care about having autonomy and respect. But the corporate culture apparatus? That’s someone else’s concern.
What People Actually Want From Work
Let’s cut through the corporate-speak and talk about what employees genuinely value:
Fair Compensation
Pay people what they’re worth. Not what market conditions allow you to get away with. Not what your compensation band dictates. What their actual contribution to the company’s success merits. Nothing kills “culture” faster than discovering your colleague doing the same job makes 30% more, or that the company just raised another funding round while salaries remain frozen.
You can’t pizza-party your way out of pay inequity. You can’t build belonging on top of resentment about compensation.
Meaningful Work
Give people problems worth solving. Grant them genuine autonomy to solve those problems. Provide the resources, tools, and support they need to do excellent work. That’s it. That’s the formula.
People don’t need culture programs to feel engaged they need to work on things that matter, with the freedom to approach problems creatively and the support to execute their ideas.
Respect for Their Time and Boundaries
Stop pretending that mandatory fun is fun. Stop acting like team-building exercises are anything other than unpaid work. Stop scheduling culture activities outside working hours and calling it optional when everyone knows it’s not.
Respect that people have lives outside of work. That they have families, hobbies, communities, and identities that have nothing to do with the company. The more you try to make the company their primary source of belonging, the more you reveal that you’re trying to extract more than you’re paying for.
Professional Relationships Without Forced Community
People are perfectly capable of building genuine connections with colleagues without corporate facilitation. They’ll grab coffee with people they like. They’ll collaborate effectively with people they respect. They’ll form friendships naturally when there’s actual compatibility.
What they don’t need is ice-breaker activities, personality assessments, or trust falls. Organic relationships built through real work will always be stronger than manufactured bonding through company-mandated activities.
So Who Actually Benefits From the Culture Obsession?
If employees aren’t clamoring for more culture initiatives, who is this all for?
Leadership Teams
Executive leadership gets to feel like visionaries instead of managers. It’s far more inspiring to write manifestos about “energy” and “shared purpose” than to fix broken processes, address systemic issues, or have difficult conversations about compensation gaps.
Culture talk allows leaders to focus on the intangible and aspirational while avoiding the concrete and measurable. You can’t be held accountable for whether the culture feels right, but you absolutely can be held accountable for whether salaries are competitive or processes are efficient.
HR Departments
Culture initiatives justify expanding HR budgets and headcount. Every new belonging program requires a program manager. Every engagement survey needs analysis. Every culture transformation demands consultants.
The output? Endless PowerPoint presentations, internal communications, and reports that measure sentiment instead of solving problems. The culture apparatus becomes self-perpetuating it exists to justify its own existence.
Corporate Consultants
An entire industry has emerged around selling culture frameworks to companies. The same repackaged ideas get sold again and again, promising transformation while delivering jargon.
Every company thinks their culture is unique, so every company pays for a bespoke culture assessment that tells them roughly the same things. The consultants make millions. The culture doesn’t actually change.
The Remote Work Scapegoat
I want to address the specific example that prompted this post the notion that remote work is killing corporate culture by eliminating spontaneous moments and reducing people to “tiles on a screen.”
This argument is nostalgia disguised as analysis, and it conveniently ignores some inconvenient truths:
Those hallway moments were never accessible to everyone. They excluded remote workers, parents who couldn’t stay late for after-hours drinks, people with disabilities who found the office environment challenging, and anyone who wasn’t part of the dominant in-group. The spontaneous moments were spontaneous for some, but they created systematic exclusion for others.
The “shared excitement” happens regardless of location. When a team ships something great, the excitement is genuine whether people are celebrating in a conference room or a group chat. The dopamine hit of solving a hard problem doesn’t require physical proximity.
Trust and collaboration are built through work, not proximity. You know what builds trust? Delivering on commitments. Communicating clearly. Having each other’s backs when things get difficult. Respecting boundaries. None of that requires an office.
Forcing people back to offices doesn’t create culture. It creates commutes, distractions, and resentment.
The push for return-to-office masked as culture concern is often about something else entirely: a desire for visibility and control, real estate investments that need to be justified, or managers who never learned how to lead distributed teams.
What Actually Matters
If you genuinely want people to care about their work and feel connected to their team, here’s what you should focus on:
Stop investing in culture programs. Invest in people instead. Channel that budget into competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, real professional development opportunities, and career growth paths that aren’t just theoretical.
Stop measuring belonging. Start measuring enablement. Do people have the tools they need? Can they get decisions made efficiently? Are there clear paths for escalation when they’re blocked? These are concrete questions with measurable answers.
Stop forcing togetherness. Trust teams to self-organize. Some teams will want to meet in person regularly. Others will thrive remotely. Many will want a hybrid approach. Let teams figure out what works for them instead of mandating a one-size-fits-all solution.
Stop pretending your company is special. Most companies do roughly similar work. Most face similar challenges. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you can focus on what actually differentiates you: the quality of work you produce, how you treat the people producing it, and whether you deliver value to customers.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Corporate Culture
Let’s say the quiet part out loud: corporate culture isn’t really about belonging. It’s about control.
It’s about making people identify with the company so deeply that they’ll accept below-market compensation for the privilege of being part of the “mission.” It’s about creating emotional investment that can be leveraged for longer hours and fewer boundaries. It’s about building loyalty that serves the company more than it serves the employee.
The culture apparatus exists to make people feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves and then to use that feeling as justification for asking them to sacrifice more.
But employees are getting smarter. They see through the posters and the speeches. They recognize when culture talk is cover for avoiding harder conversations about money, equity, and sustainable work practices. They know the difference between genuine care and performative concern.
A Final Thought
I’m not suggesting that culture doesn’t matter at all. Of course it does. How people treat each other matters. Whether there’s psychological safety matters. Whether the organization lives up to its stated values matters.
But real culture isn’t built through programs and initiatives. It’s built through a thousand small decisions how you handle a mistake, whether you give credit where it’s due, if you protect someone’s time off, how you respond when priorities conflict.
Real culture is what happens when nobody’s performing for leadership. It’s the unwritten rules about how work actually gets done. It’s whether people feel safe being honest. It’s whether the company’s actions match its words.
You can’t manufacture that with team-building exercises and culture decks. You can only create the conditions for it to emerge and then get out of the way.
So maybe it’s time to stop obsessing over culture as a thing to be built and managed, and start focusing on the fundamentals: doing good work, treating people well, and paying them fairly.
The culture will take care of itself.