Workplace Culture: Nobody Said You Had to Do This

On her first Monday at a new company in Casablanca, Salma arrived early, as is common in her local workplace culture. She found most of the office still quiet. She had gone through the usual onboarding routine the previous week: signed her paperwork, met the HR team, received her laptop and listened to a presentation about the organisation's values.

The company described itself as collaborative, open and committed to helping employees grow. It sounded like the kind of place where people were encouraged to ask questions and take initiative.

By the end of her first week, Salma had learned a different set of rules. Nothing had been written down.

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Her manager had not mentioned them during onboarding, and they certainly were not in the employee handbook. She simply noticed that colleagues rarely left before the senior managers did, that certain decisions were best discussed privately before being raised in a meeting, and that challenging someone senior required caution. She watched how people behaved and adjusted her own behaviour to fit in.

Understanding Workplace Culture

Nothing dramatic had happened. Nobody had told her she was not allowed to leave early or disagree with a senior colleague. Yet she understood what was expected of her.

That is often how workplace culture works. Companies tend to think about culture as something they define, but employees experience it as something they discover.

The difference matters. An organisation can describe itself using words such as integrity, innovation, collaboration, excellence and people first, but those words only become meaningful when employees encounter them in ordinary situations.

This happens when a deadline is missed, when someone makes a mistake, when a junior employee challenges a decision, when a manager receives bad news or when somebody asks for time away from work.

The organisational psychologist Edgar Schein, whose work has shaped much of the modern understanding of organisational culture, argued that culture exists at a deeper level than the visible values and policies an organisation publishes. Over time, groups develop shared assumptions about how things are done, and those assumptions become the unwritten guide that newcomers learn when they join.

A Statement Is Not the Same as Reality

There is nothing inherently wrong with writing down company values. Employees need to know what an organisation stands for and the kind of environment leadership is trying to create.

A clear culture can give people a common reference point. The problem begins when the written version is treated as proof that the culture exists.

A company can say it values work-life balance without employees knowing whether taking leave during a busy period will be respected or quietly remembered against them.

It can say it encourages open communication while employees learn that challenging senior leadership is career-limiting. Eventually, employees stop relying on the official explanation. They look at what happens to other people.

This is particularly relevant across Africa and the GCC because organisations do not operate in a cultural vacuum. Workplace expectations can be shaped by local attitudes towards hierarchy, authority and relationships, while multinational companies may bring corporate practices developed elsewhere.

Your First Few Weeks Are a Cultural Education

When people talk about onboarding, the conversation usually centres on logistics like laptops and email access. Those things are necessary, but they do not answer the questions a new employee is quietly asking.

How does my manager like to communicate? Can I disagree in a meeting? What happens when someone makes a mistake?

Employees begin answering those questions almost immediately. Research on workforce socialisation in the UAE has found that organisations use orientation, mentoring, coaching, buddy systems, team-building and networking to help employees understand the organisation.

That approach recognises something companies sometimes overlook: joining a company is not simply about learning a job. It is about learning how to function inside a social system.

Imagine a new employee being told the organisation values openness. In their first team meeting, they watch a colleague raise a concern and get dismissed. The new employee has just received a much clearer lesson about communication than anything written in the onboarding presentation.

The Gap Between Stated and Experienced Culture

Some of the employees in our survey said their company's stated culture reflected what happened at work. Others said it only did sometimes. That small word, sometimes, is where the issue becomes more complicated.

No organisation is perfectly consistent, but the real question is whether the inconsistency becomes a pattern. When employees repeatedly see people rewarded for being constantly available, they begin to understand that availability matters.

This is why organisational culture has a direct relationship with psychological safety. Research involving 2,451 employees across 18 societies found that organisational culture was associated with psychological safety, with trust in top management helping to explain the relationship.

Psychological safety means employees can raise concerns, ask questions, admit mistakes and contribute ideas without believing that doing so will damage their position. For a company, that difference is significant. An employee who feels safe enough to say, “I think we are making the wrong decision,” may prevent a problem.

Managers as Culture Interpreters

This is why two people can work for the same company and describe completely different experiences. Employees do not encounter an organisation's values as an abstract concept.

They encounter them through managers, colleagues, meetings, decisions, deadlines and everyday interactions. A company can have a beautifully written statement about transparency, but if employees have to calculate the risk of disagreeing with their manager, the statement has limited practical value.

The manager becomes the real interpreter of the culture. This is particularly important in culturally diverse workplaces, where employees may arrive with very different expectations about how authority should be approached.

What Gets Rewarded Matters

One of the clearest patterns in our survey was the emphasis on results. The problem is what happens when the route to those results begins to matter less than the results themselves.

Employees notice whether someone who hits every target but treats colleagues badly is still celebrated. They notice who gets promoted, who gets trusted with important projects and whose mistakes are forgiven.

Those decisions teach employees what the organisation actually values. This is where reward systems can undermine culture without leadership realising it.

A company may describe collaboration as central to its identity, yet reward almost exclusively individual performance.

A Healthy Culture Handles Difficulty

There is a tendency to describe workplace culture in terms of comfort, but a healthy workplace can still be demanding. People will disagree. Managers will have difficult conversations.

The quality of a culture is often revealed in how the organisation handles those moments. Can someone admit a mistake without being humiliated? Can a manager receive criticism without treating it as disrespect?

The point is not that every organisation needs to become a “family” or remove every form of hierarchy. It is that people need to understand the rules of the environment they are working in, and they need to have some confidence that those rules will be applied fairly.

The employee handbook can explain the rules; the workplace has to demonstrate them.