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Culture area guide

Culture Heatmap · 12 min read

How we think about the way work gets done

How we work

This area covers how you raise problems, run projects, build processes, embed change, and handle the full employee lifecycle from onboarding through hiring and, when needed, exiting people fairly.

What this culture area means

How we work covers how you raise problems, run big projects, build and scale processes, embed change, onboard new team members, hire, and when needed, exit people fairly.

This is where operating rhythm meets culture: the daily habits that determine whether your organisation learns, adapts, and ships.

How we raise problems

Healthy cultures make problems visible early. If people only surface issues when they become dumpster fires, you are paying compound interest on silence.

Design for psychological safety, clear escalation paths, and leaders who model raising problems without blame.

Projects, processes, and change

Big projects need outcome clarity, not just task lists. Processes should match your stage: light enough to move fast, robust enough to avoid chaos as you scale.

Change fails when you announce it but do not embed rituals, documentation, and accountability. Treat change as culture design, not a comms exercise.

Hiring, onboarding, and exiting

Before you can hire or onboard well, you need codified culture: behaviours that serve you, who thrives here, EVP including trade-offs, and core ways of working.

Onboarding should optimise time to impact. The sooner someone assimilates how things work here, the sooner they thrive. Exiting fairly matters as much as hiring well.

Useful resources

Playbooks, templates, and reference material to help you design and fix this culture area.