Issue 008: The Culture Gap

Boeing told the public safety was non-negotiable. In February 2024, a panel appointed by the FAA found Boeing employees were afraid to report safety concerns, and many didn't fully understand their own role in catching problems before they became incidents. Activision Blizzard paid the SEC $35 million in 2023, not for the workplace misconduct itself, but for never building a system that could tell leadership how much of it was actually happening. OpenAI's own head of safety alignment resigned in May 2024 and said the quiet part out loud: "safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products." Three different companies, three different claims about who they were, and in every case the gap only became visible once something forced it into the open.

This week is about that gap, and what it actually takes to close it before a whistleblower, a regulator, or a leaked Slack channel does it for you. Four companies that found out the hard way what their culture claims couldn't survive contact with, and one that put its whole culture in a public document anyone can go and fact-check. Three frameworks for the specific blind spots between what a leader believes about their culture and what the people inside it are actually living.

Venessa Okonkwo is this week's Leader Spotlight. She's Head of People & Culture at Dock & Bay, a Certified B Corp, where she's spent four years building the kind of measurement system most leaders only claim to have. She joins The Work Life Reporter Live this Tuesday to talk about what it actually costs to build a system honest enough to contradict you.

Welcome to the eighth issue of The Work Life Reporter. This week you get:

Let’s get into it.

In February 2024, an independent panel convened by the FAA released its review of Boeing's safety culture, following the January 2024 Alaska Airlines door plug blowout. The panel conducted more than 250 interviews and reviewed over 4,000 pages of documents. What it found: employees who didn't fully understand their own role in the safety system, and a workforce that hesitated to report concerns because management oversight of investigative roles created a real risk of retaliation, particularly around salary and furlough decisions.

Boeing had a formal "Speak Up" channel, the kind of system that looks, on paper, like exactly the honest measurement this week's issue is about. The panel found it wasn't working, because the people running the system and the people whose careers depended on staying quiet were, in practice, connected. A reporting channel that reports back to the same people it's supposed to hold accountable isn't a measurement system, it's a formality.

In February 2023, the SEC fined Activision Blizzard $35 million. Not for the workplace misconduct itself, California's DFEH had already sued the company in 2021 over allegations that directly contradicted its own stated value, "Everyone Plays. No Jerks Allowed." The SEC's charge was narrower, and in a way more damning: between 2018 and 2021, Activision Blizzard had no reliable way for leadership across its separate business units to collect, aggregate, or analyse employee complaints about misconduct. Leadership genuinely didn't have the numbers.

The value statement wasn't the problem, plenty of companies have a version of "no jerks allowed." The problem was that nobody had built the plumbing to check whether it was true. Complaints existed. They just lived in scattered systems that never rolled up into a single number a leader could look at and act on. The SEC's settlement made an unusual point: for a public company, failing to measure workplace misconduct properly is itself a disclosure risk, because investors deserve to know what leadership knows about its own workforce.

In May 2024, Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI's safety-focused "superalignment" team, resigned. His public statement was blunt: "Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products." He'd headed a team built specifically to keep the company's stated mission, safe, beneficial AI, honest as the product moved fast. His resignation, and the words he chose to explain it, became the most reliable public signal available about the actual state of that mission inside the building, more reliable than any internal survey OpenAI could have published.

This isn't really a story about one company, plenty of fast-moving organisations drift from a founding value under commercial pressure. It's a story about where the honest signal actually came from. It didn't come from an internal culture survey circulated to leadership. It came from the most senior person closest to the value walking out and saying, in public, that the value had lost. When the most credible measurement of whether a stated priority is real turns out to be a departing executive's resignation post, you've been getting the story from the wrong source the whole time.

In December 2019, The Verge published "Emotional Baggage," an investigation built largely from anonymous former employees and leaked Slack screenshots showing Away co-founder and CEO Steph Korey publicly reprimanding staff, in one case asking whether an employee was "brain dead." The brand's external image was mindful travel, inclusivity, community. The Slack channel employees actually worked inside told a different story: email discouraged, direct messages rare, most communication happening in company-wide channels where a bad day could be broadcast to everyone. Korey stepped down as CEO within days of the story running.

Away didn't lack a story about its own culture, it had an unusually strong one, built into the brand itself. What it lacked was any internal system that could have caught the gap before a journalist did. The screenshots that ended up in The Verge weren't leaked from a whistleblower channel or an engagement survey flag, they were just the Slack channel, doing what an honest measurement system should have done months earlier: showing leadership what the culture actually looked like from inside it.

GitLab runs almost entirely remote, across more than 65 countries, and instead of relying on a values poster or a leadership deck, the company's culture lives in its public handbook: thousands of pages covering how decisions get made, how disagreements get resolved, and how the company measures itself, visible to anyone, employee or not. Team member engagement surveys feed directly back into that same public document, and the results aren't softened for an internal-only audience. In 2025, GitLab earned its fifth consecutive year of Great Place to Work certification in the US, with 92% of team members saying the company is a great place to work and an 87% average across the survey's statements.

The mechanism that makes this work isn't the transparency itself, plenty of companies publish a values page. It's that the same document a new hire reads to understand "how we work here" is the document that gets edited when a survey result says the current version isn't holding up. There's no separate, quieter internal version of the truth. If the culture drifts from what's written, the fix is either the culture or the handbook, and both are visible to check.

Perceptyx's 2026 research found optimism about the future drops from 83% among executives to 63% among individual contributors, a 20-point gap inside the same organisation. Reward Gateway and Edenred's 2026 Workplace Engagement Index found 60% of decision-makers believe their employees frequently feel joyful at work, against 41% of employees who actually report feeling that way. Separate research covered by HR.com's 2026 State of Workplace Culture and Connection found a consistent double-digit gap between how much executives believe they're personally championing culture and how much their own managers say they actually see it.

None of these are separate problems. They're the same gap measured three different ways. From the top of an organisation, culture looks like something you're actively doing. From further down, it looks like something you're being told about.

Stop asking leaders to self-report on culture and calling it data. Ask the people two or three levels below them the same question, in the same week, and put both numbers on the same slide. The distance between them is the only culture metric that tells you something leadership doesn't already believe.

A 2025 industrial-organisational psychology survey found 93% of executives report feeling mostly or completely psychologically safe at work, against 86% of individual contributors and managers, and separate research puts the real floor lower still: 63% of workers say they don't feel safe sharing their opinions, and a May 2026 survey reported by CNBC found six in ten employees hesitant to speak up at all, with one respondent summarising it as "people are afraid to say the truth." Roughly one in four employees still report not feeling psychologically safe in any meaningful sense.

Psychological safety is usually treated as a mood, something a leader either has a knack for or doesn't. It's actually closer to a compliance number: a specific, trackable gap between how safe the people running the meeting feel and how safe everyone else in the room feels.

Track it as its own line, separate from general engagement. If the gap between your leadership team's psychological safety score and your frontline's score is in double digits, that's not a communication problem you can fix with an all-hands. It's a measurement your current system isn't catching, until it shows up somewhere you can't manage quietly.

Gallup's research puts real numbers on the difference: employees who receive regular feedback are roughly three times more engaged than those who only get an annual review, and employees receiving meaningful weekly feedback are, at 80%, more than five times as likely to be fully engaged as the broader workforce. A 2025 Gartner survey found 74% of organisations have already shifted to some form of ongoing feedback model, and 87% of HR leaders now say annual reviews alone are insufficient for driving engagement or retention.

The annual review isn't failing because the questions are wrong. It's failing because a once-a-year measurement can't catch a culture gap that opens and closes every week. By the time an annual score shows a problem, the problem is usually old news to everyone living inside it.

Treat feedback frequency itself as a culture metric, not just a management style. If the honest answer to "when did this person last get real feedback" is "at their last review," you're not measuring culture continuously, you're taking one photograph a year and calling it a live feed.

Venessa Okonkwo is Head of People & Culture at Dock & Bay, a Certified B Corp, where she's spent four years building a measurement system honest enough to tell her when the culture on paper doesn't match the one her people are actually living inside.

Since then, she's embedded values into 360 feedback, performance reviews, and a competency framework, so what gets measured is what actually gets lived, not what gets said in a values deck, made feedback a weekly habit instead of an annual event, started tracking psychological safety as a number instead of assuming it as a given, and helped Dock & Bay reach an 86% engagement score and Sunday Times recognition for both Learning & Development and for Women.

In this week's Leader Spotlight, we sit down with Venessa to unpack what "culture starts at the top" actually means in practice, how she built a measurement system honest enough to contradict her, and what an 86% engagement score actually costs to earn. A note on what follows: these are drawn from the discussion points Venessa has confirmed for Tuesday's conversation and her own public keynote, not a transcript, since the conversation itself hasn't happened yet as this issue goes out. Come back after Tuesday for her actual words.

The line Venessa opened her HR Technologies UK keynote with, and the one her own LinkedIn recap of the talk led on. It's a direct challenge to any leader who treats culture work as separate from the business case, worth sitting with before Tuesday's conversation goes further.

The question Venessa closed her keynote with, and the one this whole episode is built around. Most leaders can describe the culture they believe they've built. Tuesday's conversation is about what it takes to find out if they're right.

Venessa's own framing, drawn from her keynote: what leaders tolerate becomes the culture, whatever the values deck says. Tuesday digs into what leadership behaviour actually has to look like for that to be true rather than a slogan.

Not a poster on the wall. Venessa's account of how Dock & Bay built values into the systems that actually decide who gets promoted, coached, or let go, so what gets measured is what gets lived.

The gap between a great score and a culture people would vouch for unprompted, and how Venessa knows which one Dock & Bay actually has.

Thank you in advance, Venessa, we'll see you Tuesday!

Connect with Venessa on LinkedIn or find out more about Dock & Bay's work as a Certified B Corp

And that's a wrap for Issue 008. Something land? Hit reply and tell us which section you're taking back to your team.

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