Culture Work Without Commercial Intent Is Just Theatre

Most organisations will tell you they care about culture. Many invest in it. Values workshops, engagement surveys, wellbeing programmes, away days dedicated to "who we are and how we work." The intention is (usually!) genuine. The problem isn't that they're investing in culture. It's that the investment is disconnected from the commercial outcomes it's supposed to enable.

McKinsey's State of Organizations 2026 report, surveying 10,000 senior executives globally, found that less than 25% of organisations that set out to improve their performance actually achieve sustained impact. The report is clear about why: most organisations focus too heavily on one side of the equation. Some push purely on financial performance and fall short on developing their people. Others invest heavily in people and culture but never connect that investment to commercial results. The organisations that win are the ones that do both, and McKinsey's data shows they are 4.3 times more likely to maintain top-tier financial performance over a sustained period than those that treat people and performance as separate agendas.

That's the point. This isn't an argument against investing in culture. It's an argument for investing in it properly...with commercial intent built in from the start.

When culture programmes are designed in isolation from strategy, they become decorative. They create a pleasant atmosphere, perhaps even a sense of belonging, but they don't change how the organisation wins work, serves clients, or grows. The engagement score goes up. The revenue doesn't follow. And eventually, leadership starts to question why they're spending money on "culture stuff" at all. Which is the wrong conclusion drawn from the right observation.

The right conclusion isn't to spend less on culture. It's to connect culture to what it's supposed to do.

The organisations I've seen get this right treat culture as an operating advantage. I've also worked in organisations that got it wrong: that treated culture as a nice-to-have or, worse, allowed it to decay while chasing short-term financial targets, and I've seen the price they paid in attrition, client erosion, the inability to execute when it mattered most and fall in enterprise value. The difference is in the questions they ask. Not "how do we make people feel good?" but "what behaviours does our strategy actually require, and is our culture set up to produce them?" That might mean designing incentive structures that reward collaboration over individual performance. It might mean changing how decisions get made: faster, closer to the client, with fewer layers of approval. It might mean confronting the gap between what the values statement says and what actually gets tolerated in practice.

McKinsey's report reinforces this with a telling detail: only 20% of leaders believe non-financial rewards meaningfully boost performance. That means the vast majority of organisations are underinvesting in exactly the human motivators: purpose, autonomy, development, recognition - those that their own employees say matter most. The report frames this as a missed opportunity, not a vindication of the "just pay people more" school of thought. The evidence points clearly to the need for both: competitive commercial frameworks and genuine investment in the people within them.

This matters increasingly to investors. Accenture's 2024 research on private equity due diligence found that 36% of fund leaders now cite lack of cultural readiness as a top obstacle to post-deal value creation. This isn't a soft concern. It shows up in margin erosion, integration delays, attrition spikes, and slow execution. Exactly the things that destroy enterprise value after an acquisition. Separately, Private Equity International reported in February 2026 that investment firms are increasingly scrutinising target companies' workplace practices during diligence, not out of altruism, but because cultural dysfunction is a reliable predictor of operational underperformance.

For service and knowledge businesses, this is especially pointed. In these industries, culture isn't something that sits alongside the product, it is the product. The craft. The talent. The way teams collaborate, the speed at which they mobilise around a client problem, the quality of judgment they bring to ambiguous situations, the willingness to challenge a brief rather than just execute it. All of these are cultural outputs. And all of them are directly connected to whether clients stay, spend more, and recommend you.

Yet too often, culture in these sectors means something else entirely: a brand film about values, an internal awards ceremony, a Slack or Teams channel nobody reads. Meanwhile, the structural conditions that actually shape behaviour such as who gets promoted, how work is allocated, what gets measured, how conflict is handled, all go unexamined. The culture people experience is shaped by these mechanics, not by what's written on the wall.

If your culture programme can't answer the question "how does this help us grow?", and equally, if your performance framework doesn't account for how your people are developed, motivated, and supported, then both need rethinking.

Culture should be considered with the same rigour as any other part of the operating model. It should have clear objectives tied to business outcomes including client retention, speed of delivery, quality of decision-making, ability to attract and hold the right talent. And it should be measured not by how many people attended the workshop, but by whether the organisation performs differently as a result. Equally, performance frameworks that ignore the human conditions required to sustain them will produce short-term gains and long-term fragility.

The organisations that get this right don't choose between people and performance. They treat them as the same thing.

At Intelio Works, we help leadership teams build cultures that are designed around commercial goals, and performance frameworks that invest in the people who deliver them. Because sustained growth requires both.