Build a healthy workplace culture where employees thrive

Every organization has a distinct work culture, a complex environment shaped by its core values, leadership priorities, and the unique mix of its people. This culture forms the makeup of a company's everyday environment, but what truly defines a healthy work culture?

Successful people managers know that healthy work cultures that foster a happy, satisfied workforce directly translates into greater productivity and better employee retention. If you are not actively focused on enhancing employee satisfaction, you will likely face difficulties attracting top talent and holding onto your best current employees.

Here are a few steps for creating a measurably healthier work culture at your company.

A healthy workplace culture is the set of shared behaviors, communication norms, and feedback habits that help people feel safe, supported, and motivated to do their best work. 

Perks don’t build culture; behaviors do. A healthy workplace environment develops from the choices people make each day: how managers communicate, how teams set expectations, and how feedback turns into action. When these practices are consistent, culture becomes measurable, not mysterious, and improvement becomes possible.

To create a healthy workplace environment, you must build a culture that actively prioritizes trust, employee well-being, psychological safety, and professional growth.

Each step includes a short checklist of actions to take, metrics to track, and SurveyMonkey resources you can use to get started.

Start with a quick culture pulse today, then keep listening, learning, and improving over time.

Healthy, high-performing work cultures don't happen by accident—they start with absolute clarity.

Organizations that make their culture goals explicit and measurable see stronger performance and retention, according to Harvard DCE. Why? Because clear, shared targets ensure employees understand exactly how their day-to-day work supports the company's ultimate success.

To make culture tangible, choose just three to five critical behaviors that directly tie to key outcomes like customer responsiveness, safety, or innovation. Involve managers and employee representatives in the process, and clearly publish how progress will be measured and shared.

These goals should be simple, repeatable habits, such as committing to:

When expectations are this clear, employees know what "good" looks like, and leaders gain the ability to track and reward those vital habits in day-to-day work.

How do you know if your culture goals have actually landed? You must measure whether employees understand your shared habits and know exactly where to find expectations and decisions. These signals reveal if your culture is truly clear enough to guide everyday work, or if it remains a vague concept.

You can embed these critical items into our Employee Engagement Survey Template:

Tracking these indicators over time is the ultimate barometer. It reveals whether expectations feel clear and if your carefully designed culture goals are genuinely showing up in your team's day-to-day work.

The manager isn't just a role; they are the frontline of your workplace culture. A single check-in can either powerfully reinforce employee trust or instantly weaken it.

Healthy communication starts when leaders prioritize regular check-ins, listen with genuine curiosity, and consistently close the loop on what they hear. Over time, these simple habits are one of the strongest and most reliable drivers of employee engagement.

When managers successfully create space for open dialogue, employees feel both supported and empowered to deliver their best work. This isn't soft stuff—it’s critical business strategy: The Gallup State of the Global Workplace Report confirms highly engaged teams have dramatically lower absenteeism and significantly higher productivity and profitability.

Every conversation is a chance to strengthen engagement and deepen investment in shared goals.

To ensure managers are driving engagement, give them a clear, repeatable structure for connection:

Verify impact: Follow up at the end of the week with an employee pulse survey to confirm that workload balance and clarity are actually being maintained.

How can you definitively measure if manager check-ins are driving engagement and building genuinely healthy workplace relationships?

Employee engagement surveys are your clearest tool. They help you understand how well communication is flowing between managers and teams by measuring employee perceptions of clarity, support, trust, and psychological safety over time.

Tracking responses to employee engagement questions over time reveals the truth: Are employees satisfied with the level of manager communication?

More importantly, are trust, psychological safety, and overall engagement improving as a direct result of these interactions?

Healthy workplaces don’t wait for the annual review to talk about what’s working. A feedback loop builds trust, clarity, and confidence, core ingredients of a psychologically healthy workplace. When people get frequent, meaningful input, they know how to improve, where to focus, and that their voice matters.

YES Communities used a simple, continuous feedback loop—mixing engagement, exit, and pulse surveys—to pinpoint the root causes of employee turnover. This shift allowed them to act on insights immediately, increasing average employee retention from just 90 days to 1.5 years.

Every conversation becomes a signal: what to start, stop, or keep doing. A steady rhythm of feedback helps transform those signals into a culture of learning and belonging.

To shift from annual reviews to real-time action, establish a predictable, empowering rhythm:

The Key: Share outcomes transparently so everyone clearly sees how their feedback turns directly into measurable action.

Don't let continuous feedback create continuous overload. The purpose of your listening strategy is to ensure work remains sustainable and focused, not to slide into confusion or exhaustion.

Focus your pulse checks on three vital areas: Do employees feel clear about expectations, supported by their manager, and do they have a balanced workload?

Use the Culture Pulse Survey Template to run quick, recurring pulses with rotating questions like these:

Action: Review scores quarter-to-quarter. Look for patterns that show whether clarity, workload balance, and sense of belonging are genuinely improving, allowing you to catch overload before it happens.

The secret to true flexibility? Clear structure. While the desire for autonomy is real, remote work cultures thrive when expectations about how and when work gets done are absolutely clear. This structure creates predictable rhythms that protect focus, fairness, and connection, resulting in a more mentally healthy workplace.

This is non-negotiable: our work-life balance statistics reveal employees rank balance as the most important factor when choosing a job, surpassing pay.

To meet this demand and reduce turnover, flexibility must be defined, not improvised, through clear norms about when to collaborate, when to disconnect, and how to communicate.

Stop the guessing game and define how you work. Draft a short team charter to cut through confusion and establish predictable rhythms for your team. This living document should set clear expectations for:

Action: Share the draft, solicit feedback for 48 hours, then finalize and post it prominently—turning potential chaos into collective confidence.

Don't let flexible work arrangements accidentally lead to confusion or burnout. Use employee pulse surveys to actively track whether flexibility is truly supporting focus, connection, and sustainable workloads. When flexibility is implemented effectively, it protects work-life balance instead of eroding it.

Include these high-impact, Likert scale questions in your employee pulse checks to gauge performance and connection:

Action: Review responses over time to see if flexibility is driving healthy balance and focus, or if you need to adjust your team's norms and workloads before burnout sets in.

Open communication isn't measured by talk time—it’s defined by how an organization handles priorities, risks, and mistakes in public. A healthy dialogue exists when people at every level feel safe enough to ask the hard questions, offer dissenting views, and raise flags without worrying about repercussions.

When senior leaders transparently explain the "why" behind decisions, actively invite feedback, and close the loop on what they hear, employees are far more likely to trust the direction, even during difficult change. Over time, that consistency builds a culture where teams instinctively know where to raise concerns, how their input is used, and what to expect next.

To make transparency a working habit, focus on a single, high-stakes decision or upcoming change. This practice ensures communication flows both up and down before a final commitment is made.

Don't assume transparency is working. You must measure whether communication about decisions feels two-way, transparent, and safe. These signals are the best proof that people trust the process and feel genuinely comfortable speaking up.

Use short, high-impact pulse-survey questions to test the health of your dialogue:

To capture actionable insights and unearth hidden issues, include an open-text prompt: “What risk did we miss or what could we improve next time we roll out a change?”

Action: Review results regularly. This reveals whether employees feel heard and informed, allowing you to proactively spot themes you can address in your future updates and strategy.

A truly healthy workplace is one that inspires people to stay, grow, and become powerful advocates for your mission. Remember: your employer brand is built every day through real employee experiences, not just marketing campaigns.

When teams feel genuine pride in their work and see visible progress resulting from their feedback, that pride transforms into your most powerful recruiting and retention tool.

This is supported by data: A Built In analysis linked authentic employee stories and consistent follow-through on feedback to stronger trust and dramatically higher candidate interest.

Effective internal communication isn't just about sharing results—it's about creating visible action that builds trust and reinforces good habits.

Employee pride and advocacy are vital signals that show how likely people are to stay, recommend your organization, or champion its work outside the company. These aren't just feel-good metrics—they are your most powerful recruiting and retention tools.

Measure the strength of this internal brand loyalty by including short advocacy questions in your next culture pulse survey, such such as:

For a simple, repeatable metric that tracks this loyalty over time, deploy the Employee Net Promoter® Score (eNPS) Survey Template to quantify advocacy with precision.

Inclusive workplace cultures don’t happen by accident. Inclusivity is by design. A healthy and inclusive workplace makes sure every employee feels valued, respected, and able to contribute fully. Belonging grows when inclusion is treated as a daily practice, not a single initiative.

Deloitte research on building neuroinclusive workplaces, published in The Wall Street Journal, highlights how designing for neurodivergent employees can improve the work environment for everyone. When people feel psychologically safe to share ideas, challenge assumptions, and learn from one another, collaboration and innovation both strengthen.

Move inclusion from an abstract concept to a daily practice with these targeted steps:

The true test of an inclusive culture is whether your employees feel they belong and can succeed. To measure the efficacy of your efforts, track key signals related to inclusion, fairness, and access to opportunities across all teams.

Use a belonging index—perfect for short pulses or your quarterly culture surveys—with high-impact items like these:

To capture actionable next steps, always include an open-text prompt such as: “What’s one change that would increase your sense of belonging here?”

Action: Review these responses over time. The trends will reveal if your inclusion efforts are genuinely improving the everyday experience for all employees. For expert scales and additional questions as you design your index, refer to the Belonging and Inclusion Survey Template.

Every day you listen, act, and learn, you take a step toward a healthier work environment. Culture grows stronger when feedback turns into change, when inclusion guides decisions, and when recognition reinforces the behaviors that matter most.

Start small: run a quick culture pulse this week, plan your quarterly deep dive, and close the loop with a 30-day “you said, we did” update. Every measurable action—listening, adjusting, recognizing—shapes a healthier, more connected workplace environment.

NPS, Net Promoter & Net Promoter Score are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.