On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Andrew Tuchfeld, Director of People Relations at Braze. Andrew has spent years inside the talent and employee relations functions at Gilt.com, KIND, and Blue Apron. At Braze he built and runs the global People Relations team, the function most companies do not name explicitly but that quietly carries the weight of culture work.
Andrew argued that culture conversations get stuck because companies treat culture as something HR owns and produces. In his view, culture is the byproduct of how every team operates, what gets rewarded, and what leaders tolerate. The HR team can shape it, measure it, and protect it, but the team cannot create it on its own. The harder question for any HR leader is: who actually owns the moves that move culture, and how do we make those moves visible?
That conversation has gotten more pointed as companies finalize return-to-office plans, tighten budgets, and watch engagement scores slip. The companies still pulling away on culture share a common discipline: they have stopped treating culture as a vibe and started treating it as a set of repeatable practices.
Why Most Culture Definitions Fall Apart
The trouble usually starts at the values exercise. A leadership team gathers, picks five words, prints them on the wall, and assumes the meaning will travel. It rarely does. Within months, employees are using the same words to mean opposite things, and managers default to whatever they were doing before.
The data on what culture is worth keeps getting clearer. SHRM research found that workers in positive cultures are nearly four times more likely to stay with their employer, and 83 percent of employees in good cultures are motivated to produce high-quality work compared to 45 percent in poor cultures. The financial case is settled. What is not settled is the operational definition.
The companies that get past the values-poster trap define culture as the set of behaviors that show up in real decisions. How do hiring committees say no. How do managers handle missed deadlines. How does the executive team handle a revenue miss. How do leaders show up in their first town hall after a layoff. Each of those is a behavior, observable and trainable, and each shapes culture more than any value statement.
Who Actually Owns Culture
Is culture the CEO's job or the CHRO's job?
Both. The CEO sets the ceiling. The CHRO builds the floor. The ceiling is what the CEO models in moments of pressure. The floor is the operating discipline that keeps culture from sliding when leadership is not in the room. Companies that confuse one for the other tend to either overburden HR or under-resource the work.
What is the role of middle managers in culture?
Middle managers are where culture either compounds or collapses. Gallup data consistently finds that managers account for 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. The CHRO can build the best programs in the company, but if a manager is dismissive in a one-on-one, the culture in that team is whatever the manager makes it.
What Actually Works: A Framework for Culture That Holds
Design principle one: write down the behaviors, not the values
Replace value words with behavior statements. Instead of integrity, write we update commitments when we are off track within 24 hours. Instead of customer obsession, write every PRD includes the customer quote that triggered the work. Behaviors are observable. Values are not. Behavior-based definitions also let you train new managers and onboard new hires with concrete examples instead of abstractions.
Design principle two: instrument what you defined
If you said your culture is feedback-rich, measure feedback frequency and depth. If you said your culture is decisive, measure how long open decisions sit in the queue. Tools like employee surveys and pulse surveys let you turn culture statements into trend lines and catch drift before it becomes attrition.
Design principle three: hold leaders accountable in the same place you hold everyone else
Calibration is a culture moment. If executives skip the same review cycles other employees go through, the values posters do not matter. If executives go through the same coaching, the same upward feedback, and the same scrutiny on performance, culture statements stop being aspirational and start being operational.
Where Employee Relations Fits
The People Relations function Andrew runs at Braze is the unsung backbone of culture work. When a complaint surfaces, the way the company handles it teaches every observer what the culture really is. A consistent, fair, well-documented response strengthens the culture. An inconsistent response, even a well-intentioned one, undermines years of program work. Strong company culture programs treat ER as the operating system that makes the culture statements real.
How does ER work change what culture can be?
When employees see that concerns are taken seriously, that managers are coached when patterns appear, and that outcomes are explained, they update their model of what the company actually is. That update is a stronger driver of organizational culture than any leadership offsite. It is also the foundation of employee engagement, because employees who trust the ER process are willing to invest more discretionary effort.
Frequently Asked Questions About Defining Company Culture
What is the difference between culture and values?
Values are the words on the wall. Culture is the pattern of behavior employees see every day. The two diverge when the words and the behaviors do not match. Closing that gap is the central job of culture work.
How often should we revisit our culture definition?
Every two to three years for a full review, and continuously for behavior calibration. The values themselves rarely need to change. The behavior statements that operationalize them should be revisited as the company grows, as remote and hybrid patterns shift, and as new leadership joins.
How does remote work change culture work?
It exposes weak culture work and rewards strong culture work. In the office, casual proximity papered over inconsistent behavior. Remote and hybrid patterns make the gaps visible. Companies with strong behavior definitions translate well across modes. Companies that depended on hallway osmosis struggle. Work-life balance norms also need to be defined explicitly, not assumed.
Should culture be different on different teams?
Subcultures are healthy. The engineering team and the sales team should not feel identical. What needs to be consistent is how decisions get made about people, how feedback gets handled, and how leaders show up under pressure. The variation should be in how the work happens, not in how people get treated.
What is the single biggest predictor of strong culture?
Manager quality. The companies with the strongest cultures invest disproportionately in manager training and coaching. They also remove or reassign managers who consistently undermine the culture. Building a culture that retains employees always comes back to who is leading the team.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Andrew's central point is the most useful frame for any HR leader running a culture program: stop trying to define culture from the top and start codifying the behaviors that actually produce it. The poster on the wall is not the work. The work is the calibration cycle, the manager training, the response to a complaint, the way the executive team handles a hard week.
The companies that take this approach often look quieter from the outside. They are not running splashy culture campaigns. They are running tight feedback loops and consistent ER processes. The result, two or three years in, is that engagement holds, attrition slows, and employees can describe what the culture actually is in concrete terms.
That is what a defined culture looks like in practice. Not a slogan. A pattern.
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