We don’t guess. We ask your people.
Most culture advice starts with a framework and works backwards to your company. We start with your company — what your team says when it’s safe to say it, and what your operation does when nobody’s watching.
The symptom is rarely the problem.
Complaints, quiet turnover, missed deadlines, departments pulling in different directions — those are what you can see. They’re almost never where the problem lives.
A leader can spend a year fixing the thing in front of them and end up in exactly the same place, because the structure that produced it never changed. Our job is to find the cause, show you the evidence, and put your effort where it will actually hold.
That’s why we look at culture and operations at the same time. How people feel and how the work runs are not two separate conversations.
Every audit runs the same four steps, in this order.
The order matters more than the steps. Skipping straight to execution is how organizations end up busy and no better off.
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01
Listen
Confidential one-on-one interviews with your people, plus a survey your whole organization can answer honestly. We ask the questions leadership can’t ask and get answers leadership wouldn’t get.
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02
See
We segment what we heard by department, location and level, so patterns separate from one-offs. You find out whether a problem is company-wide or sitting in one corner of the building.
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03
Prioritize
Everything worth fixing, sequenced by what will move the most and what has to come first. You get your strengths too — knowing what already works keeps you from breaking it.
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04
Execute
Then we do the work, or coach your team through it, or hand you the plan — whichever fits. This is the step most engagements never reach, and it’s the only one your people will notice.
Where you land on step four is the only real decision — and you make it after you have the findings, not before.
Findings you can act on this quarter.
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An honest read
What your people actually think and say about your culture and your business — including the parts nobody has told you.
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Segmented data
Reporting broken down far enough to be useful: by department, by location, by level — delivered as a heat map and a written report, not one company-wide score.
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Your priorities, ordered
A plan that says what to do first, what can wait, and what you should leave alone because it’s already working.
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A way to keep score
A baseline you can measure against later — benchmarked against organizations like yours — so you know whether the changes you made actually landed.
Before you book.
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Will my team actually be honest?
Interviews are confidential and findings are reported in aggregate. People are simply more candid with an outside party — and the reluctance to speak up internally is well documented: in the largest global study of workplace ethics, nearly half of employees who reported misconduct experienced retaliation for doing so.1
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What if we already know the problem?
Often leaders are half right. The audit tells you which half — your gut feeling gets validated or corrected with data, and it’s hard to move forward with confidence until you have it. Seniority genuinely works against you here: in 360-degree assessments of more than 1,200 leaders, the more senior the leader, the wider the gap between their self-assessment and how the people around them actually rated them — on 19 of 20 competencies measured.2 Not ignorance — altitude.
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Do we have to commit to everything?
No. The audit stands on its own. What happens after it is a separate decision, made once you’ve seen the findings.
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How do we start?
A discovery call. You tell us what’s going on, we tell you straight whether we’re the right people for it.
- Ethics & Compliance Initiative, 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey — 75,000+ employees across 40+ countries. ethics.org/gbes-2023
- Fabio Sala, “Executive Blind Spots: Discrepancies Between Self- and Other-Ratings,” Consulting Psychology Journal 55, no. 4 (2003): 222–229. Read the study (PDF)