The Problem Beneath the Surface: Why You’ll Wish You Had Done a Workplace Check-up Sooner
Not every challenge in an organization announces itself with alarm bells.
Sometimes, the early signs are subtle: a few key people leave, project timelines start to slip, or meetings start to feel more like box-checking than opportunities for collaboration. At first, it doesn’t seem like much—but these are often symptoms of deeper issues with team dynamics, leadership or the workplace culture.
Let me share an example. After a few years of steady growth, the leadership team at this mid-size company was proud of their workplace culture - flat hierarchy, flexibility, and high employee engagement. But slowly, things started to shift. Their Head of Sales left suddenly. A few months later, two senior managers handed in their notice. One of the rising stars in the company said they felt “stuck” in a conversation with HR.
Individually, none of these moments indicated a crisis. Turnover wasn’t unusually high, and key metrics still looked healthy.
What They Missed
What leadership didn’t see was a growing misalignment between how employees experienced the culture and what leaders believed it to be. In adapting to some external challenges and steady growth informal communication had broken down. Teams felt siloed. New managers—promoted quickly to keep up or to fill roles left by turnover—struggled without leadership development. Engagement was fading, but it wasn’t showing up in surface metrics yet.
Things went on like this for awhile until eventually the cracks started to become harder to explain away or ignore. High turnover in one department was starting to result in lost contracts that effected the bottom line – often the trigger for action. An external consultant was brought in to address “low morale” and it was then that leadership began to see the full picture. At that point trust had eroded. A more comprehensive culture audit had to be done, and while helpful, it was reactive—more of a rescue operation than a check-up.
Workplace Check-Up
A Workplace Check-Up could have provided:
Early insights into where leadership styles were clashing with team expectations
Data on how aligned employees actually felt with the mission and values
A map of cultural “friction points” emerging in cross-functional collaboration
Concrete recommendations for supporting new managers and strengthening internal communication
You don’t need to wait for a crisis to check in on your workplace health. We designed the Workplace Check-Up to give leaders a proactive way to catch emerging issues early, align their perception with reality, and make targeted, meaningful changes before small problems become systemic. A culture check-up is like changing your oil—far cheaper than replacing the engine.
In just a few weeks, you can gain clear, data-backed insights into the human dynamics that drive your performance—and surface the issues that don’t show up on dashboards.
Curious if it’s time for a pulse check?