The Culture Vultures Are Coming: Why Your Internal Culture Training Is Probably Making Things Worse

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Nobody talks about this, but I reckon about 67% of internal culture training programs are actually destroying the very culture they're meant to build.

Been consulting in this space for seventeen years now, mostly across Melbourne and Sydney corporate corridors, and I've seen more culture initiatives crash and burn than successful ones. The worst part? Companies keep throwing money at the same broken approaches while wondering why their engagement scores stay flatter than a pancake.

Here's what's really happening in your organisation right now. Your HR team schedules mandatory "culture workshops" where everyone sits in a sterile conference room talking about "core values" that sound like they were written by a committee of robots. Trust. Integrity. Excellence. Innovation.

Bloody hell.

Meanwhile, in the real world, your best performers are leaving because they can't stand working with that one toxic manager who somehow always gets a pass because they "deliver results." And your culture training? It's teaching people to smile and nod while internally screaming.

I've worked with companies like Google Australia and Atlassian, and you know what the difference is? They don't just talk about culture – they fire people who don't fit it. Even high performers. Especially high performers who poison the well.

But most Australian businesses are too chicken to do this. They'd rather run another workshop about "psychological safety" while keeping the workplace psychopath in middle management because changing things is hard work.

The real problem with internal culture training isn't the content. It's that it's treating symptoms instead of causes.

You want to know what actual culture change looks like? It starts with your CEO firing their mate from uni who's been coasting in senior leadership for the past five years. It's promoting people based on how they treat the office cleaner, not just their quarterly numbers. It's making decisions that cost money in the short term but build trust in the long term.

Culture isn't something you can workshop your way into. It's something you live every single day through thousands of tiny decisions.

Most culture training programs I've encountered assume everyone wants to change. Wrong. About 23% of your workforce actively resists any change, and they'll smile through your training while undermining everything behind the scenes. These are the people who say things like "we tried that before and it didn't work" or "that's not how we do things here."

And here's the kicker – sometimes they're right.

I remember working with a tech startup in Brisbane where the founders kept pushing this "work hard, play hard" culture. They brought me in because turnover was through the roof. Turned out their "play hard" meant mandatory Friday drinks and weekend team building events. Their best developers were introverts who just wanted to code brilliant software and go home to their families.

The culture training was trying to force square pegs into round holes.

Smart culture change acknowledges that not everyone needs to be best friends. Some people want to come to work, do excellent work, and leave. That's perfectly fine. The goal isn't to create a cult; it's to create an environment where different types of people can thrive while working toward common goals.

But most culture consultants won't tell you this because it doesn't sell expensive ongoing programs.

Real internal culture training should be about three things: clarity about what's actually expected, consequences for people who consistently violate those expectations, and recognition for people who embody the culture you want.

Everything else is just expensive team bonding.

The companies that get this right don't call it culture training. They call it "how we work here" and they integrate it into every hiring decision, every performance review, and every promotion. When someone new starts, they don't get a PowerPoint about values – they get paired with someone who lives those values.

Netflix figured this out years ago with their culture deck. They didn't waste time trying to change people who didn't fit. They just hired people who already shared their values and fired people who didn't, regardless of performance. Brutal? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.

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Australian businesses are generally too polite to adopt this approach fully, but we can learn from the principle. Stop trying to convert the unconvertible. Start being crystal clear about what you actually expect from people, not what sounds good in a mission statement.

I've seen companies spend ridiculous amounts on culture initiatives while ignoring obvious problems. Like the Melbourne law firm that ran empathy training while their partners regularly screamed at junior staff in open plan offices. Or the Perth mining company that preached safety culture while pressuring workers to skip safety checks to meet deadlines.

The disconnect would be funny if it wasn't so damaging.

Here's what I tell every client: your culture is what happens when leadership isn't watching. It's the conversation in the lift after the all-hands meeting. It's how people treat each other when there's no one around to impress. It's whether people feel safe to disagree with their boss or admit they made a mistake.

You can't train your way out of systemic leadership problems. You can't workshop your way past toxic personalities in key positions. And you definitely can't create psychological safety while keeping people who consistently destroy it.

But you can be honest about what needs to change and brave enough to make those changes, even when they're uncomfortable.

The best culture training I've ever seen was at a Adelaide manufacturing company. The CEO stood up and said, "We've been talking about respect for two years while tolerating disrespectful behaviour. Starting today, anyone who yells at a colleague gets a written warning. Second time, you're gone. I don't care if you're my biggest client or my best sales rep."

Within six months, their engagement scores doubled.

That's not training. That's leadership.

Sometimes the most powerful culture intervention is admitting that your current culture training isn't working and having the guts to try something completely different. Or maybe admitting that culture problems aren't training problems at all – they're accountability problems.

Either way, stop pretending that putting people in a room with flip charts and sticky notes is going to transform anything meaningful. Culture change happens in the messy, everyday moments when no one's keeping score.

That's where the real work begins.