Your culture isn’t broken. It’s been spreading.
By the time your engagement survey flags the damage, transmission has already been occurring for months.
Think about the most capable person on your team right now. The one who joined full of ideas and genuine confidence. Notice what’s changed. Have they started hedging their language? Stopped challenging decisions? Got quieter in meetings?
That’s not disengagement. That’s a brain that has learned what this environment actually rewards. A brain that has learned the lesson will teach it to the next person who joins.
Maha Chehab مها شهاب put a name to something I have been trying to describe for a very long time. She called it an Organisational Culture Pandemic, a widespread crisis of psychological and behavioural burnout fuelled by dysfunctional cultures, self-imposed pressures, the cumulative impact of others’ behaviours, and the complex human factors that shape every organisation. That really struck a chord with me.
The data backs her up. Safe Work Australia reports a 161% increase in mental health compensation claims over the past decade. These claims take longer to resolve and cost more than almost any other category of workplace injury. The pandemic is not a metaphor. The harm is measurable, and it is climbing.
Yet unlike a medical pandemic, organisations rarely isolate the source. They measure the outcome, rename the values, run a wellbeing program, and wait for the next survey to tell them if anything has changed.
It won’t. Not without interrupting transmission.
Predictive brains don’t learn what we say culture is. They learn what culture does, what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, what gets punished when no one is formally watching. They pass that learning on through every meeting, every silence, every interaction that either confirms safety or confirms threat.
We have been managing culture as a communication problem when it is a contagion problem. The intervention point is not the outcome. It is the daily transmission.
If we are treating this as the pandemic it is, we need to think like epidemiologists, not comms teams.
If you were advising an organisation right now, what is one thing you would tell them to STOP doing, and one thing they genuinely need to START?
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