Why Your Culture Data Isn't Telling You What You Need to Know and How to Fix It
What if the culture surveys and engagement data your organization relies on aren't actually telling you what you need to know? And what if this blind spot is leading to costly surprises and ineffective change efforts?
Most HR and Ethics and Compliance professionals share a common frustration. Despite extensive engagement surveys and ethics questionnaires, they still find themselves surprised when serious cultural issues surface. The data looked fine. Yet somehow, the underlying problems were hidden in plain sight. It's not only that problems go unidentified. When they do surface, a lack of understanding of the real root causes leads us to pick up our hammer of choice: more training, a new policy, a 10-point action list, a revamped culture initiative. But these efforts often end up being ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive.
In the latest episode of the Leading Transformational Change podcast, I sat down with Dr. Caterina Bulgarella, a social scientist with over 20 years of experience in culture transformation and a leading expert on culture assessment, to explore why this gap exists and what it takes to truly understand your culture, identify root causes, design effective interventions, and avoid costly surprises.
Caterina holds a PhD in organizational psychology and was part of the core research team at Ethical Systems at NYU, where she co-created the Two-Factor Model of Ethical Culture, a framework now widely used in corporate ethics programs.
I'm incredibly excited to share that Caterina is now a collaborator and behavioral expert on our Heart Management team, sharing her deep insights with our clients and partners.
The problem with your survey data
Most employee surveys do exactly what they're designed to do. They measure employee experience and organizational climate. But that's different from truly understanding culture.
"Culture is essentially meaning," Caterina explains. "It's about how people make sense of their experiences within the organization's social fabric."
Standard surveys tell you what people think about their day-to-day experience. But they don't reveal why people behave the way they do, what pressures they face, or how they navigate ethical dilemmas when it really matters.
Even positive results can be misleading. Teams might report strong "speak up" behaviors based on their routine experience. But what happens when pressure increases? When a crisis hits? Often, that's precisely when the speak-up culture disappears, yet your survey data won't capture it because people answered based on typical conditions.
Understanding behavior under pressure
"Pressure always trickles down," Caterina notes. Organizations understand that employees face competing priorities. But do we really grasp the ethical trauma of reconciling these demands with both organizational and personal values?
Standard surveys can't unpack this complexity. They can't reveal how history shapes current responses: why certain teams learned that staying quiet is safer, or how past layoffs connect to current trust issues. They can't decode what certain experiences mean to people in your specific organizational context.
A more rigorous approach
Caterina advocates for combining science-based surveys with a "dialogic approach": creating spaces of trust where employees can share and reflect on their experiences in depth. This isn't about focus groups or a few open-ended survey questions. It's about building a safe process that allows people to explore meaning and reveal the implicit narratives that drive behavior. As part of the process, it helps leaders begin to take personal ownership of their culture.
"You're not just asking questions," Caterina explains. "You're helping people understand their own experiences." When analyzed through a robust framework like the Two-Factor Model of Ethical Culture, this reveals patterns that surveys cannot detect. It helps identify the root causes undermining cultural health, can challenge the usual way of doing things, and lead to much better designed and targeted interventions.
This approach requires triangulation: combining existing survey data with qualitative investigation, comparing multiple sources, and looking at implicit meanings and connections between different elements.
The cost of getting it wrong
I've spoken with organizations that went through crises and scandals and were forced to invest heavily in transformation initiatives. Years later, they're uncertain whether they ever truly understood or addressed the root causes. Many implemented "best practices": more training, stricter policies, awareness campaigns, without really knowing if these interventions matched their actual cultural challenges.
As Caterina notes, interventions must be not only appropriate to the root causes but also tailored to the specific cultural context. An approach that works in one environment might be counterproductive in another. Without understanding culture deeply, we risk investing significant resources in solutions that miss the mark or even create unintended adverse consequences, which will undermine trust in the initiatives and functions responsible for them.
Where to start
Caterina's advice is practical: start small. Identify a team or location worth investigating. Commit to investigating culture, not just measuring it. Look at those insights and compare them with other available data sources.
The goal isn't to replace existing programs but to complement them with a level of understanding that makes you truly preventative in managing risk and genuinely effective in changing behavior.
Cultural transformation isn't a project. But it can be approached with methodological rigor, scientific grounding, and genuine curiosity about what's really happening beneath the surface.
The question isn't whether you can afford to investigate culture this deeply. It's whether you can afford not to.
Listen to my full conversation with Dr. Caterina Bulgarella at the top of the page. And don't hesitate to reach out to our team to explore how you could more effectively assess the culture in your organization and receive deeper insights.
