The truth about company culture: it’s not a poster on the wall

Company culture isn’t something you hang in a frame and hope your employees live by. It’s what happens in the everyday moments — how decisions are made, how teams collaborate, and how values translate into action.

Ingrid De Clercq has spent years helping fast-growing companies define, refine, and protect their culture. She knows that in the chaos of scaling, culture can be your greatest asset. During her talks at The Impact Circle and Love Tomorrow, the Chief People Officer at Deliverect unpacked why culture isn’t a feel-good HR project, but rather a business-critical foundation that demands constant attention.

Relive Ingrid's talk at Love Tomorrow Summit:

Involving the right people

If you want a culture to stick, you have to involve the people who live it every day.

At its core, culture is built with people, not for them. That means engaging both the leadership and the so-called “belly” of the organization — the employees who keep things moving. When both groups have a voice, the result becomes something authentic.

But getting there requires more than a single whiteboard session. For example, Ingrid uses hands-on, creative exercises to draw out people’s intuitive answers. By using LEGO® as a tool or organizing value-clustering workshops, she helps participants think beyond job titles and tap into what truly matters to them on the work floor.

From values to everyday practice

Once values are defined, the real work begins: weaving them into everything. That includes hiring, onboarding, team rituals, performance reviews, and even offsites.

Making these values tangible also means translating broad concepts into concrete behaviors for every department. “Customer champion” might sound inspiring, but what is it really? In sales, it could mean quick follow-ups and proactive feedback loops. In product, it might mean involving customers in early testing. It needs to be specific enough that employees know exactly how to live it day to day. Without that translation, values stay abstract — nicely framed words that are gathering dust.

Living the values

Another thing to pay attention to when making your values tangible is the work environment — both physical and digital. Offices, workspaces, and even Slack channels can either reinforce or undermine what your company stands for.

If you say you value collaboration, but there’s nowhere for people to meet, you’re contradicting yourself.

Sometimes, living your values also means making hard calls. If someone on your team, no matter their job title, refuses to collaborate, you may need to let them go. That decision then — even if they happen to be a top-performing salesperson — isn’t about numbers. It’s about protecting the culture.

Culture also doesn’t stop at the walls of your HQ. Mergers and acquisitions bring their own challenges. Mapping cultural similarities and differences early in the process can prevent costly clashes later, because even shared values on paper don’t guarantee shared behaviors in practice.

Culture isn’t static

As companies grow, markets shift, and challenges emerge, values need to evolve. The values you defined in the early stage may no longer match your reality once you’ve scaled. As Ingrid put it:

Sometimes the old culture is like a jacket that doesn’t fit anymore — you need to tailor it to where you are now.

Culture is never “done”

In the end, there’s no shortcut. Culture-building is an ongoing process of listening, refining, and reinforcing. It’s never “done”, and that’s exactly the point.

Culture is like a campfire – you can have a beautiful fire but if you don’t add a new log from time to time, it will snuff out.

At the end of the day, a healthy culture isn’t measured by the poster in the hallway. It’s measured by the way your people work together when no one’s watching.