How company culture can drive business strategy and unleash productivity

In today’s challenging and volatile business climate, HR and business leaders are seeking ways to enhance productivity and drive organizational success. Because the way culture influences performance is specific to each organization and its distinct strategy, connecting culture and strategic success can be challenging. Yet culture is one of the few hard-to-replicate competitive advantages. HR and business leaders are often left grappling with the question of how to create a culture that drives strategic success. To answer it, we drew on our database of employee experiences to analyze data from more than 800 companies in three strategic areas: customer experience, innovation and operational excellence.

Key insights

1. Customer experience: Organizations that perform strongly in customer experience as a priority emphasize leaders communicating a clear, mission-focused vision that drives strategic decisions and actions. WTW global data shows the percentage of employees who reported confidence in leadership dipped from 82% to 76% from 2024 to 2025. As employees become less confident in leadership mission and strategy, leadership communication becomes increasingly important. They focus on growing and recognizing their employees. And they provide rich recognition and fair rewards for performance against clear standards and customer expectations. They emphasize looking outward and forward in the market and being able to respond to change quickly.
2. Innovation: Companies focused on innovation prioritize long-term success over short-term goals, encouraging risk-taking and learning from failures. They emphasize swift action through collaborative dialogue, seek diverse perspectives, provide broad access to information and reward high performers significantly more than average performers. There's a clear commitment to investment in development and an orientation toward long-term careers.
3. Operational excellence: Organizations that focus on operational excellence are data-oriented. They analyze data before making decisions and share the outcomes freely to ensure awareness and build alignment. This data-driven approach creates an environment of employee feedback and improvement, holding employees accountable for their work. They emphasize feedback from customers and from employees to leaders. And they often incorporate a commitment to excellence in their mission statements.

Developing your culture model

WTW's culture model defines culture as the combination of mindsets and behaviors that shape organizational experience and are made tangible through enabling programs, policies and practices. The insights from the research highlight the kinds of mindset and behaviors that are present in these organizations. The third and critical component of culture requires enabling systems. By aligning the design of these systems so they are consistent with the desired mindset and behaviors, conflicting cultural messages or “cultural dissonance” can be avoided.

Alignment of culture and strategy is critical

The alignment of culture with strategy is crucial for enhancing productivity. By understanding the cultural drivers of strategy, HR and business leaders can create an organizational culture that supports their strategic priorities. While changing or evolving your culture isn't a quick fix, it is entirely achievable through commitment and people-centric approach to change management. Whether your organization focuses on customer experience, innovation, operational excellence or a combination of these, the key to success lies in aligning your culture with your strategy.

Author

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Adam Hall

Senior Director, Employee Experience

email Email phone +61 3 9698 9324

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