How to Make Workplace Culture a Priority for Your Leadership Team

Framing HR's impact in terms of business performance and financial results is what earns culture a seat at the executive table.

HR and people leaders across Canada often know their organisation needs to look harder at the employee experience and workplace culture. They can see it weighing on results. The harder part is persuading the leadership team to treat it as a priority.

The most effective way in can feel counterintuitive for an HR professional: open with business performance, not with culture. Senior leaders do care about their people. What pushes the employee experience down the agenda is that it usually arrives framed as an HR initiative rather than as a lever on results.

The wording makes all the difference. Tell executives "we need to improve employee engagement," and many will hear "HR wants to run another survey." Tell them "we are falling short on alignment, accountability, and execution, and we need to know whether the employee experience is helping or hurting," and you are speaking the language of the business.

Where HR Strategy Loses the Room

The most common misstep in HR strategy is failing to tie culture to the outcomes executives are actually measured on. HR teams talk about engagement and survey scores, while the C-suite is wrestling with a different list of questions:

• Why are we missing our targets?
• Why does execution vary so much from one team to the next?
• Why are our teams pulling in different directions?
• Why are managers not holding people accountable?
• Why are we moving so slowly?

Those questions are the natural starting point, and Canadian executives have good reason to be asking them. Statistics Canada reported that the labour productivity of Canadian businesses fell 0.5% in the first quarter of 2026, a second straight quarterly decline, while unit labour costs rose for a fourth consecutive quarter.

The case for workplace culture rests on evidence, not sentiment. Great Place To Work® research consistently links trust to performance: high-trust companies see triple the stock market returns, and high-trust leadership unlocks growth at small and medium-sized businesses.

How to Connect Workplace Culture to Business Challenges

Picture a retail organisation that keeps falling short of its sales goals. Leadership responds the way many do: more sales contests, more incentives, more bonuses, on the assumption that stronger financial motivation will lift results.

When the numbers refuse to move, the team finally asks what it is missing. Focus groups deliver an uncomfortable answer. Pay was never the core problem. Employees felt that leadership cared about their output and nothing else.

No new bonus could fix that. Employees were not asking for a bigger reward; they wanted proof that they mattered as people, not only as producers of results.

What looked like a sales problem was really a trust problem. And the absence of trust was surfacing everywhere: in turnover, absenteeism, productivity, customer experience, engagement, and, yes, sales.

Using People Analytics to Shift the Conversation

Now consider an organisation that keeps missing customer commitments and stalling on key initiatives. The executive team's instinct is to demand more accountability: more reports, more status meetings, more dashboards.

A better first step is to gather evidence. Employee survey data offers the fullest picture of what working there is actually like. Pair it with business and demographic data, and you are doing the real work of people analytics.

The insight lives in the gaps, so get curious about them:

• Which groups: Who is having a noticeably different experience from everyone else?
• Which leaders and locations: Where are outcomes stronger, and what is happening differently there?
• Which outcomes: How do those patterns connect to turnover, productivity, sales, safety, customer experience, quality, or execution?

This is how the employee experience becomes a business conversation: by using it to diagnose the root cause of weak performance.

Answering Your Leadership Team's Doubts

Most executives accept that work culture matters. They are far less willing to put it ahead of the things that can cost them their jobs, such as missed revenue targets or a disappointed board and shareholders.

When a leader asks why this deserves attention now, the honest answer is direct. Hitting those targets takes your people, and without trust that becomes very difficult. The strain is already showing: Statistics Canada found that half (50.2%) of Canadian managers frequently work to tight deadlines. A team that does not trust its leaders has little capacity left to absorb that kind of pressure.

Any hockey team that has lifted a championship trophy understands this. Talent and systems are not enough on their own. Winning teams have trust, alignment, accountability, leadership, and execution. Players know their roles, rely on one another, and will sacrifice for the shared goal.

Organisations work the same way. A company can be full of exceptional people and still underperform if those people are not aligned, do not trust their leaders, and do not feel supported.

Make the Business Case for Workplace Culture

HR leaders do not need to keep persuading executives to care about "soft" issues. The bigger opportunity is to show how workplace culture is already shaping the hard numbers they watch most closely: revenue, customer satisfaction, and market performance.

That is how great workplaces are built.

Ready to build that case with your own data? The Trust Index™ Survey measures what your people are really experiencing, and the Great Place To Work Effect shows how that trust translates into stronger business results.