How it feels to work here
Every organisation has a stated culture. Values on a wall, words in an induction pack, a paragraph in the annual report. And every organisation has a lived culture - what happens in the room when a mistake is made, who gets promoted, whether anyone says the difficult thing out loud.
Culture, as this dimension measures it, is the distance between those two.
Not whether your culture is good. That question has no answer, and anyone offering one is selling you a benchmark.
The question is narrower and more useful: does what this organisation says it values show up in what people experience day to day? An organisation can hold thoughtful values and run a culture that contradicts them. It can also have no stated values at all and a culture people would defend. The distance between the two is what the dimension reads.
So the assessment does not ask people whether they like the culture. It asks how often five specific things are true in their experience. Each of the five is a different place that distance can open up.
Culture is the dimension people reach for first, and the one most often mistaken for the whole picture.
What makes Culture worth reading alongside the other seven is that it is where the other seven become visible. A strategy people feel no ownership of tends to surface as silence in meetings. A pace of work people cannot sustain surfaces as a workforce that reads as flat rather than unsafe. Change arriving faster than people can absorb surfaces as caution, which looks like a culture finding and is not one.
Culture is frequently the place a condition shows up, rather than the place it originates. Read alone, it tells you where the organisation is feeling something. Read against Strategy, Flow, Development and Change, it tells you where that feeling is coming from.
This is why States of Vitality is not a culture survey. Culture is one of eight dimensions of organisational health, and the eight are read together.
The Culture score is the mean of five statements. Those five measure different things, and they move independently - which is why the mean is the beginning of the reading rather than the end of it.
Whether day-to-day behaviour matches what the organisation says it stands for.
The most basic test, and the one most organisations assume they pass. Stated values are easy to write and hard to live. This dynamic asks whether the values the organisation talks about are recognisable in how people behave - not on the away day, but on an ordinary Tuesday.
Whether people feel safe to speak up honestly, even when what they have to say is difficult.
Psychological safety, in the sense Amy Edmondson gave the term: not comfort, but the shared belief that speaking up carries no personal penalty. This dynamic has a bearing on the rest of your data. Where people do not feel safe being honest, an organisation has fewer routes to finding out anything true about itself - including through an assessment.
Whether mistakes are met with learning rather than blame.
Adjacent to safety to speak, and separable from it. People can feel safe raising a concern in a meeting and still understand that an error will be counted against them. The two frequently diverge, and the pattern is worth seeing: where blame is the standard response to failure, people take fewer of the risks the organisation needs, and report fewer of the errors it needs to know about.
Whether everyone is treated with respect, whatever their role, position or background.
The relational fabric of the organisation. Respect is rarely reported uniformly. Where it varies, it tends to vary by group - and a whole-organisation mean will not show that. This is a dynamic where the demographic breakdown usually carries more information than the average.
Whether what gets rewarded and celebrated matches what the organisation says it values.
People infer what an organisation values by watching who is promoted, what is celebrated, and what is quietly tolerated. Where those signals differ from the stated values, people tend to follow the signals. This dynamic reads that alignment directly.
The assessment asks how often each statement is true. Below is what each end of that scale describes. Neither column is a judgement - both are descriptions of what people report.
Alongside the five scored statements, everyone is asked one open question about culture:
What's it really like to work here day to day?
The responses are not scored, summarised or averaged. They appear in the dashboard as written, so the numbers and the words can be read next to each other rather than one standing in for the other.
Where Culture sits against the other seven dimensions, and how much of the overall shape it accounts for.
The spread beneath the mean - which of the five statements the score rests on, and which sit further from it.
Culture is a dimension where responses commonly diverge by role level, department and length of service. The dashboard shows those splits rather than resolving them into one number.
In their own words, unsummarised.
Five statements, each answered on the same five-point frequency scale: almost always, often, sometimes, occasionally, rarely. The prompt is how true is this in your experience?
That prompt is a deliberate choice. Agreement scales measure opinion - whether someone endorses a proposition about the organisation. Frequency scales measure observation - how often a person reports seeing something happen. Opinion tells you what people think about the organisation. Frequency tells you what they encounter in it.
The dimension score is the mean of the five. It is reported on the 1-5 scale rather than converted to a percentage, and it carries the language of the scale with it - a Culture score of 3.6 reads often true, and means the average respondent reported these five conditions as often true, not that the organisation scored 72%.
Alongside the mean, the dashboard shows the spread. Two organisations can return the same Culture score with different distributions underneath: one where the five statements cluster tightly, one where two sit high and three sit low. The mean is identical. What it describes is not.
Culture is one of eight dimensions States of Vitality reads across a whole workforce. We can talk through what an assessment would look like - scope, timing and price.