Why changing the way people work takes more than a new set of values, and what leaders can do to make change stick.
An organisation decides its workplace culture needs to change. Leaders agree on new values, announce their commitment to doing things differently and bring everyone together to launch the initiative.
The response is positive. People contribute ideas, conversations are encouraging and there's a genuine sense that something is moving in the right direction.
But a few weeks later, what has actually changed?
Are different voices being heard in meetings? Are managers responding differently when someone makes a mistake? Are people collaborating more openly, or have they returned to the same habits under a new set of values?
The real test of culture change isn't whether people understand the culture you want. It's whether they experience something different in the way they work.
This is where many well-intentioned culture initiatives come unstuck. Leaders focus on communicating what needs to change without giving equal attention to how people will make that change happen.
And while building trust within teams is often part of the ambition, trust develops through consistent experiences and behaviours, not simply through a statement of intent.
John Kotter's Eight-Step Change Model offers a useful way to approach this challenge. Although originally developed for organisational transformation, its principles can help leaders understand how to involve people in culture change, build momentum and make new behaviours part of everyday work.
Why is workplace culture so difficult to change?
Culture is shaped by what people experience repeatedly. It's how decisions get made, how disagreements are handled, which behaviours are recognised and what happens when things don't go to plan.
Some of those habits have developed over years. Others are reinforced every day without anyone particularly noticing.
Consider an organisation that wants a more collaborative culture but continues to reward individual achievement above team contribution. Or a leader who asks for honest feedback but becomes defensive when someone offers it.
In both cases, employees receive conflicting messages about what is genuinely expected.
There is a business case for taking culture seriously. Research discussed by CEDA on collaborative workplaces found that high-performing workplaces in a study of 78 Australian firms were up to 12% more productive than lower-performing workplaces. Leadership, information sharing and involvement in decision-making were among the practices examined. These findings show associations, not a guaranteed return from any particular culture initiative.
More recently, the 2025 Workplace Engagement Index found that 47% of surveyed Australian employees frequently felt productive at work, compared with 68% in the previous year's survey. It's a measure of employee perceptions rather than independently measured output, but it raises important questions about the experience organisations are creating for their people.
Leaders exploring the cost of disengaged employees should therefore look beyond engagement scores to the everyday practices that might be supporting or undermining performance.
Understanding the need for change is one thing. Helping people change how they work is another.
What are Kotter's Eight Steps for Change?
Developed by Harvard Business School professor John Kotter, the framework identifies eight important components of successful organisational change.
Kotter has since evolved his original linear model into eight interconnected accelerators, recognising that change rarely unfolds in a perfectly ordered sequence.
For workplace culture, that's a particularly useful distinction. Leaders may be working to remove barriers, recognise progress and involve employees at the same time.
The following eight steps offer a way to examine where your culture change efforts are strong, and where something important might be missing.
1. Create a Sense of Urgency: Give people a reason to care
Culture change often begins with leadership recognising a problem. Perhaps employee feedback has deteriorated, departments are struggling to collaborate or good people are leaving.
But recognising the problem at leadership level doesn't mean the wider team understands why change is necessary.
Telling employees the organisation needs to become more collaborative is unlikely to mean much if nobody explains what isn't working and why it matters.
A more useful starting point is an honest conversation.
Where is the current culture making people's work harder? What opportunities are being missed? What would improve if the team approached things differently?
The need for change should be grounded in experiences people recognise, rather than manufactured urgency or fear.
Research into Australian workforce attitudes, including The Conversation's discussion of why employees consider changing jobs, also reminds leaders that employees have their own expectations of what makes a workplace worth staying in.
Ask your team: What is one thing about how we currently work together that we can no longer afford to ignore?
2. Build a Guiding Coalition: Culture change can't belong to HR alone
A common mistake is making workplace culture the responsibility of one department.
People & Culture may coordinate the initiative, but employees experience culture through their managers, colleagues and everyday interactions.
Kotter's second step focuses on bringing together people who can help lead and influence change.
That means looking beyond job titles.
Who do people trust? Who understands the challenges different teams face? Who is willing to question established habits and demonstrate a better way of working?
A guiding coalition might include senior leaders, frontline employees, team managers and respected colleagues who understand how work actually gets done.
Their role isn't simply to promote the initiative. It's to listen, challenge assumptions, model new behaviours and help colleagues participate in shaping what comes next.
A broader people and culture strategy can establish the direction, but those closest to the work need to help translate it into everyday practice.
Ask yourself: Are the people shaping our culture change representative of the people expected to live it?
3. Form a Strategic Vision: Make the future culture visible
Most organisations can describe the culture they want in a handful of words.
Collaborative. Accountable. Inclusive. Innovative.
The challenge is that people can interpret those words very differently.
One employee might understand accountability as taking ownership of a problem. Another might interpret it as making sure mistakes are reported to management.
A vision for culture change becomes more useful when leaders explain what it will look like in practice.
Rather than saying, "We want better communication," describe how meetings will run, how information will be shared and what employees should be able to expect from one another.
For example:
"In our team, everyone will have an opportunity to contribute before major decisions are made. We'll share relevant information early, welcome different perspectives and explain the reasoning behind our decisions."
That's something people can recognise, discuss and practise.
The vision should also connect to the organisation's wider goals. Culture is part of organisational development, not a separate project competing for attention.
Ask yourself: Could someone in your team describe what working here will feel like when this change succeeds?
4. Enlist a Volunteer Army: Give people ownership of the change
Kotter's fourth step recognises that meaningful change needs people who actively want to contribute.
This is particularly relevant to workplace culture.
Employees are more likely to engage with a change when they have opportunities to influence it, rather than being handed a finished set of behaviours and told to adopt them.
That doesn't mean every decision needs to be made by committee. It means giving people genuine opportunities to identify problems, suggest improvements and test new approaches.
Different teams may also need different ways to participate.
Research from Korn Ferry on Australia's hybrid workplaces highlights the importance of flexible working arrangements and the changing expectations around connection, development and work-life boundaries.
For a remote employee, involvement might mean contributing ideas asynchronously. For frontline teams, it might require short discussions during rostered hours. Others may respond best to facilitated workshops or collaborative problem-solving sessions.
The goal is meaningful participation, not compulsory enthusiasm.
Ask yourself: Are we inviting people to help shape the change, or simply asking them to agree with it?
5. Enable Action by Removing Barriers: Change what gets in the way
This may be one of the most overlooked parts of culture change.
Leaders ask people to work differently while leaving the conditions around them exactly the same.
A team is encouraged to innovate but must navigate several approval processes before testing an idea. Employees are asked to collaborate, but their performance measures reward individual results. Managers encourage honest communication, yet people have learned that raising concerns can have consequences.
If those conditions remain unchanged, even motivated employees can find it difficult to practise new behaviours.
Kotter's fifth step asks leaders to identify and remove the obstacles preventing progress.
Some barriers are procedural. Others involve leadership habits, communication practices, access to information or the way success is recognised.
One practical approach is to ask employees which existing process, expectation or behaviour makes the desired change hardest to achieve.
Then remove or improve something.
That could mean adjusting meeting formats, changing approval arrangements or giving teams more freedom to solve problems together.
Ask yourself: What are we asking people to do differently that our current systems make unnecessarily difficult?
6. Generate Short-Term Wins: Help people recognise progress
Culture change takes time, but people need opportunities to recognise that their efforts are making a difference.
Kotter's sixth step focuses on creating and celebrating early wins.
For culture change, those wins don't have to be dramatic.
Perhaps a team that previously struggled to share ideas has introduced a meeting format where everyone contributes. Maybe two departments have started solving problems together rather than passing responsibility between them. Or a manager has changed the way they respond to mistakes, making it easier for employees to speak openly.
What matters is that the progress is genuine, visible and connected to the behaviour the organisation wants to develop.
Recognition also matters.
Korn Ferry's Australian workforce performance research highlights the role of motivation, flexibility and workplace relationships in employee performance.
Rather than celebrating another completed workshop, recognise the people putting new behaviours into practice.
Ask yourself: What has changed for the better that our team can actually see or experience?
7. Sustain Acceleration: Don't stop when the first improvements appear
One successful workshop, a positive employee survey or a few encouraging examples can make leaders feel that their culture initiative is working.
But progress can disappear when attention shifts elsewhere.
Teams become busy, priorities change and established habits return.
Kotter's seventh step challenges organisations to build on early progress rather than treating it as the finish line.
For leaders, this means revisiting the behaviours they've agreed on, discussing what's working and identifying where more support is needed.
It also means learning from what didn't work.
If a new approach to meetings has helped one department but made little difference elsewhere, explore why. Perhaps the teams have different needs, leaders are reinforcing the behaviours differently or another barrier has emerged.
This is also where development activities need follow-through. As discussed in VideoLearningAI's guide to measuring training effectiveness, completion and satisfaction tell us something about participation, but not necessarily whether learning has changed workplace behaviour.
Culture change requires similar scrutiny.
Ask yourself: What are we doing to build on progress after the initial energy has faded?
8. Institute Change: Make new behaviours part of everyday work
The final step is about making change last.
If a behaviour only happens when a particular manager reminds everyone, it hasn't yet become an established part of the culture.
Kotter's eighth step focuses on embedding new ways of working into the organisation's systems, expectations and shared understanding of success.
That might mean incorporating agreed behaviours into onboarding, leadership development, team meetings, performance conversations and recognition practices.
It also means ensuring new employees encounter the culture through what people actually do, rather than just what the induction materials say.
An organisation seeking a more collaborative culture should be able to identify where collaboration is encouraged, demonstrated and recognised across everyday work.
Resources on sustaining organisational culture change can help leaders think through how these expectations become part of ongoing management practices.
Ultimately, culture change becomes more established when people no longer experience the new behaviours as an initiative. They experience them as the normal way their team works.
Ask yourself: If we stopped talking about our culture initiative tomorrow, which behaviours would continue?
Where do team experiences and play fit into culture change?
Kotter's model helps leaders understand how to mobilise and sustain change. But there is another important consideration: how do people get opportunities to experience the culture they're trying to create?
A team may agree that listening, collaboration and trust matter. Yet those behaviours can be difficult to explore when everyone remains within their familiar working routines.
Shared experiences can create opportunities for people to interact differently.
A collaborative challenge might reveal who naturally takes the lead, who notices the details others overlook or how a team responds when its first idea doesn't work.
A charity team-building experience might offer opportunities for shared purpose and contribution. A facilitated workshop can help colleagues understand different communication preferences and discuss how those differences affect everyday interactions.
At Corporate Challenge Events, we use play-based experiences to create opportunities for connection, exploration and teamwork. Play can provide a setting where people try unfamiliar approaches, see colleagues differently and reflect on what happens when they work together.
But participation must feel genuine, and no single experience can create lasting culture change on its own.
The value grows when leaders connect what happened during an experience to what happens afterwards.
Experience creates the opportunity. Reflection helps people understand it. Application gives them something to practise at work.
That might be as simple as recognising during a team activity that quieter colleagues contribute valuable ideas when given time to think, then changing the format of everyday meetings to make room for those contributions.
Play is not a substitute for leadership. It's one way to give people meaningful opportunities to explore and practise the behaviours leaders want to develop.
How do you know if your workplace culture is changing?
It's tempting to measure culture change through participation numbers, workshop feedback and employee engagement surveys.
Those measures can be useful, but they don't tell the whole story.
A team might thoroughly enjoy an event and still return to exactly the same way of working the following week.
A more useful starting point is to identify a small number of behaviours that should change and look for evidence that they're becoming part of everyday work.
If your goal is stronger collaboration, are teams involving one another earlier in decisions? If it's greater trust, are employees more comfortable raising concerns? If it's better leadership communication, are managers consistently sharing information and inviting feedback?
Combine these observations with employee feedback and relevant organisational outcomes. Our guide to measuring culture change explores how leaders can assess progress without relying on a single score.
Start with a baseline, choose what matters to your team and review the evidence regularly.
The purpose isn't to prove that every initiative worked. It's to understand whether the culture people experience is becoming closer to the one the organisation wants to create.
Before you launch another culture initiative, ask yourself this
If you're responsible for workplace culture, it's worth considering where previous efforts have lost momentum.
Was the reason for change clear? Did employees have a genuine opportunity to contribute? Were managers demonstrating the behaviours being asked of others? Did the organisation remove the barriers that made those behaviours difficult?
Or did the work largely stop once the initiative had been launched?
Kotter's Eight Steps give leaders a way to examine those questions without assuming there's a single formula for every organisation.
The most useful starting point may not be another announcement, workshop or employee survey. It may be an honest conversation about which part of the change process your team has been overlooking.
What would your employees say has genuinely changed about working in your organisation over the past six months?
And if the answer is very little, what could you do differently?
At Corporate Challenge Events, we help organisations create meaningful opportunities for their people to connect, collaborate and explore different ways of working through play-based team experiences and workshops.
If you're planning a culture change initiative, we'd love to explore how a thoughtfully designed team experience could support the behaviours and relationships you're trying to develop.
