Ep. 196 - Culture Check Up : 3 Ways to Get an Honest Assessment of Your Company Culture
Company culture is not a poster on the wall or a mission statement you read at onboarding. It is the lived experience of your staff, athletes, and families every day, especially when leaders are not in the room. A culture checkup helps sports business owners, gym owners, and program directors stop guessing and start seeing reality. When you approach culture as a detective, you collect facts instead of stories: what people do, what they say, how they treat each other, and what gets rewarded. The goal is not to prove you are “right” about your culture. The goal is to get an honest assessment so you can reinforce what is working, fix what is not aligned with your core values, and make a clear plan for the next quarter or season.
The first tool is simple but powerful: in-program observation. Put yourself physically in the space and watch a normal day with fresh eyes. Notice behaviors, tone, language, and micro-moments of customer service. If you already have core values, look for evidence of them happening in real time, and also evidence of what contradicts them. To get valid data, tell your coaches and staff what you are doing so they do not panic or perform, and commit to not “fixing” things in the moment unless it is a safety issue. Take notes, use a consistent template, and consider asking another leader or even a trusted parent to observe too. More viewpoints make patterns easier to spot, and patterns are what reveal the real culture.
Next, run surveys for staff and customers to measure employee engagement, customer experience, and retention risk. Keep surveys under one minute so more people respond, and mix quick ratings with a couple of open-ended questions to capture both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Remember you often hear from the extremes, so treat the results as signals, not a complete census. For staff, the stakes feel higher, so anonymous paper surveys during a staff meeting can produce more honesty than an emailed form. Offer multiple ways to share: anonymous, one-on-one, and small-group conversations. The most important rule is emotional neutrality. If leaders argue, rebut, or show defensive body language, people learn that feedback is unsafe, and the culture quietly degrades.
Finally, audit your resources because numbers do not lie. Look at where time, energy, and money actually go, then compare that to what you claim to value. If “safety first” is a core value but equipment is broken and not replaced, the budget is telling the truth. If “always keep evolving” matters, your calendar should include training time, continued education, and paid prep, not just customer-facing hours. If leaders spend the season reacting to parent conflict, that may signal missing upfront expectations, better communication systems, or proactive meetings. A strong culture audit ends with curiosity and a plan: keep evaluating, avoid “should” thinking, and give yourself weeks, not days, to turn data into better leadership and a healthier sports organization.
