Maturity model · 7 dimensions

Culture Audit.

A three-to-four-week read of what an organisation's culture is actually like and where words and deeds part company. Seven facets — the observable carriers of culture rather than a maturity ladder: Decisions & power, Voice & mistakes, Reward & recognition, Leadership consistency, Ways of working, Belonging & fairness, Change & learning — each read in five health bands from Corrosive to Thriving. The workforce survey is the light spine; the substance is the latent-culture layer: assumptions, unwritten rules, rituals, symbols and taboos inferred across methods, located by segment (shared, subcultural, contested), checked against the documents for the say/do gap, and put back to the workforce in a resonance round before anything is reported. Grounded in Schein (culture is deciphered from contradictions, not read off a survey), the cultural web (Johnson & Scholes) and Martin's three perspectives on where consensus lives. The audit ends in priorities — protect, fix, ask — and its data is the baseline for a target-culture programme.

7 dimensions5 methods5 maturity levels

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What the Culture Audit model measures

Decisions & power: How decisions really get made, who has to be in the room, and the distance between the org chart and real influence.
Voice & mistakes: Speaking up, whether senior views get challenged in the room, and what happens to people after something goes wrong.
Reward & recognition: What is actually praised, promoted and quietly punished, and whether that matches what the organisation says matters.
Leadership consistency: Whether leaders' behaviour matches their words, and what is modelled from the top.
Ways of working: Pace, rituals and routines, meetings, control systems and workload norms — how the work actually gets done.
Belonging & fairness: Trust between groups, fairness of treatment, inclusion, and where the subculture divides run.
Change & learning: How change lands, and whether the organisation learns from what happens to it.

How it's assessed

Workforce survey — Anonymous ~12-minute survey: 28 positively-keyed items across the seven facets, three 0–10 climate sliders, a three-word pick and the unwritten-rule question. Fielded by open link and QR so the frontline is reachable; site / level / tenure intake drives the segment cuts.
Discussion groups — Four to six facilitated groups of 6–10, stratified by the agreed cut and always including the frontline. One pass per facet plus the culture-signals block; an indicative band per facet.
Leadership interviews — Six to eight confidential one-to-ones: the espoused culture, how decisions really get made, what leaders believe is rewarded, where they know the gap is.
Document review — The paper pack — stated values, board and exec packs, speak-up and disciplinary policies, comms samples, engagement and exit data, grievance and incident records, post-change reviews — banded on what the documents evidence so the say/do index has documented levels.
Site observation — Optional. One or two walks: symbols and artefacts, status symbols, meeting rituals, the daily routine — what is on the walls against what happens beneath them. Triangulation only; never scored.

Results are reported against 5 maturity levels: Corrosive, Strained, Mixed, Healthy, Thriving.