Company Culture Examples: 14 Real Examples You Can See at Work

Good company culture shows up in small, repeatable behaviors, like how leaders share numbers and how they react to mistakes. Chris Dyer, named the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026 by MSN.com and author of The Power of Company Culture, organizes the 14 examples below by his 7 Pillars of Culture. Each pillar gets one example from a company you’ve heard of and one from his own years as a CEO.

Table of Contents

• What Company Culture Actually Is
• 14 Company Culture Examples by Pillar
• Want Your Leaders to See These Examples Live?
• Bad Company Culture Examples to Learn From
• The Example I’m Least Proud Of
• How to Find Culture Examples in Your Own Company
• Frequently Asked Questions
• About the Author

Ask ten employees to describe their company culture and you’ll hear ten versions of the mission statement. Ask them what happened the last time someone made an expensive mistake, and you’ll hear the real answer.

The stakes are measurable. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report found global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, and estimated that disengagement cost the world economy $438 billion in lost productivity. Gallup also found managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Culture lives in what managers do on an ordinary Tuesday.

The examples below are concrete on purpose. Each one is a behavior you could watch happen, which is the only kind of culture example worth copying.

What Company Culture Actually Is

Company culture is the set of behaviors people repeat when nobody is checking. Values on a wall describe the culture leaders want. Behaviors describe the culture they have.

In The Power of Company Culture, Chris Dyer groups those behaviors into seven pillars: Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, and Mistakes. He built the framework after running PeopleG2 through 20 years of growth and 15 Best Place to Work awards. The pillars give you a way to sort examples so you can see which parts of your own culture are strong and which are missing.

14 Company Culture Examples by Pillar

Transparency

Example 1: Netflix publishes its culture. In 2009, Reed Hastings and Patty McCord posted Netflix’s internal culture deck publicly, a slide presentation of more than 100 pages describing how the company actually makes decisions, including uncomfortable topics like how it lets people go. Candidates knew exactly what they were signing up for before they applied.

Example 2: PeopleG2 opens the books. Inspired by Jack Stack’s The Great Game of Business (1992), Chris Dyer shared PeopleG2’s financials with employees and taught them how to read the numbers. The result surprised him. Employees started bringing ideas for saving money and growing revenue that had never occurred to them when the numbers were secret.

Positivity

Example 3: The Ritz-Carlton trusts its staff with money. Ritz-Carlton employees are known for being allowed to spend up to $2,000 to fix a guest’s problem without asking a manager. The dollar amount matters less than the message: leadership assumes good judgment and good intent.

Example 4: The pajama day. Chris Dyer’s Remote Work co-author, Kim Shepherd, came back from a 10-day vacation to find her team at Decision Toolbox bickering and pointing fingers. She sent everyone home and told them to come back the next day in pajamas with a pillow. They arrived to find mats on the floor and sippy cups of juice waiting for them. Teams drawn from a fishbowl spent the day solving the real problems, and it’s hard to stay angry in pajamas. The cliques dissolved and the collaboration came back.

Measurement

Example 5: Google measures what makes teams work. In Project Aristotle, Google studied 180 of its teams to find out why some outperformed others. The top factor was psychological safety, the belief that you can take a risk on your team without being embarrassed or punished. Google turned a vague culture word into something it could measure and improve.

Example 6: One question a week. Most companies survey employees once a year, then take months to act. At PeopleG2, Chris Dyer replaced that with a single anonymous question every week, which added up to 52 questions a year. Questions like “What are you struggling with?” and “Who has been your rock star recently, and why?” got thoughtful answers because people only had one question to think about, and leaders could respond within days.

Acknowledgement

Example 7: 3,500 handwritten cards. For his last eight years leading PeopleG2, Chris Dyer wrote personal holiday cards to everyone connected to the company, including contractors and key vendors. By the final year the count passed 3,500. He started each October, aiming for about 70 cards a day, and researched people he didn’t know well by asking their managers about specific projects.

One email stopped him cold. A woman named Tamara from client services wrote to thank him and added, “I didn’t know you knew I existed.” She had worked there four years. All the recognition programs in the world hadn’t told her the CEO knew her name.

Example 8: The promotion in a box. At a Decision Toolbox holiday party, Kim Shepherd played Santa and handed out boxes of new business cards. Two leaders said they didn’t need more cards. “Open the box,” she told them. Inside were cards with their new titles, Chief Recruitment Officer and Chief Financial Officer, along with notes about their raises. Two people were promoted, and the whole company got to watch it happen.

Compare that with a company Chris Dyer consulted for, where an employee learned she’d been promoted when a calendar invitation appeared. Same promotion. Completely different moment.

Want Your Leaders to See These Examples Live?

These examples come from Chris Dyer’s keynote The 7 Pillars of Amazing Culture, which walks leadership teams through each pillar with stories and a short self-assessment. MSN.com named him the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026, and Inc. Magazine named him the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture. You can see his keynotes at chrisdyer.com/speaking.

Uniqueness

Example 9: Patagonia lets people go surfing. Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard titled his 2005 book Let My People Go Surfing after a real policy: flexible schedules so employees can catch good waves when they come in. The policy only makes sense at Patagonia, which is exactly why it works. People feel like they belong to something specific.

Example 10: A company vocabulary. PeopleG2 invented its own meeting names. A “cockroach meeting” was a short, optional meeting to deal with a small problem before it multiplied. An “ostrich meeting” was where anyone could pull their head out of the sand and admit they didn’t understand something. Shared language like this gives employees insider knowledge, and insider knowledge builds trust.

Listening

Example 11: Toyota’s andon cord. On Toyota production lines, any worker can pull the andon cord to stop the line when they spot a problem. The cord turns listening into a system. Leadership doesn’t wait for a quarterly survey to learn something is wrong. The person closest to the problem has the authority to raise it immediately.

Example 12: A week of watching. When a healthcare technology CEO named Darnell hired Chris Dyer to diagnose a retention problem, Chris spent his first week watching. He sat in meetings and ate lunch in the break room. He saw a new hire’s first day that felt like a trip to the DMV and an 11-minute performance review that neither side wanted. Darnell’s company was doing all the right activities. Listening by watching showed it wasn’t creating any moments people would remember.

Mistakes

Example 13: Intuit throws failure parties. Intuit, the company behind QuickBooks and TurboTax, is known for celebrating smart failures with parties and awards. The point is to reward the courage to try something and share what went wrong, so the next idea arrives sooner.

Example 14: Zappos eats a $1.6 million mistake. In 2010, a pricing error on Zappos’s sister site 6pm.com capped prices at $49.95 for several hours, costing about $1.6 million. Zappos honored the orders anyway. Customers and employees both learned what the company valued when it hurt.

Bad Company Culture Examples to Learn From

Negative examples can teach faster than positive ones. Each of these comes from Chris Dyer’s books or consulting work.

• The $45 discount that cost a hotel its best guest. A front-desk employee gave a movie star a $45-per-night discount to keep him happy. The general manager, who had secretly booked friends into a nearby room, fired her. The star checked out and moved to another hotel. One overreaction cost the hotel a repeat customer and its best front-desk person.
• The DMV first day. A new hire spent two hours on paperwork, met a manager who was running late, and sat alone at her desk most of the afternoon.
• The 11-minute performance review. Checkboxes filled, then “see you next quarter.” Both people wanted it to end.
• The email that said “great work, everyone.” A team hit its revenue goal and got a one-line email. The person who made it possible got nothing more.

The Example I’m Least Proud Of

That last example is mine. Her name was Marisol, and she’d been my operations manager for six years. The Monday after we hit our Q3 revenue target in 2017, I sent the leadership team a quick email: “We did it. Great work, everyone.” Then I moved on to the next thing.

What I didn’t learn until months later was that Marisol had worked every weekend for three straight months to make that number possible. She missed her daughter’s quinceañera rehearsal. She canceled her anniversary dinner twice.

She quit three months later. When I asked why, she said, “You hit the number. You never saw what it took to get there.” Years later I called to apologize, and she told me something I’ve never forgotten: “You weren’t a bad boss. You just weren’t paying attention to the right things.”

I had a culture on paper. I had awards. I still missed the one moment that mattered most to one of my best people. That’s why Chris Dyer’s culture keynotes focus on behaviors and moments instead of mission statements.

How to Find Culture Examples in Your Own Company

1. Pick one pillar where you suspect your culture is weakest.
2. Ask five employees at different levels to describe the last time that pillar was tested, such as the last big mistake or the last promotion.
3. Write down what actually happened, not what policy says should happen.
4. Choose one behavior to change in the next 30 days, and tell people you’re changing it.
5. Ask the same five people again in 90 days.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some examples of good company culture?

Strong examples include Netflix publishing its culture deck, Google measuring psychological safety in Project Aristotle, Toyota letting any worker stop the line, and Intuit celebrating smart failures. Chris Dyer’s PeopleG2 examples include open-book finances and more than 3,500 handwritten holiday cards a year.

What are the 7 pillars of company culture?

In The Power of Company Culture, Chris Dyer defines seven pillars: Transparency, Positivity, Measurement, Acknowledgement, Uniqueness, Listening, and Mistakes. Each pillar describes a set of daily behaviors leaders can practice and measure.

What is an example of bad company culture?

Firing an employee for an honest judgment call is a classic example. In one hotel story from Chris Dyer’s book, a manager fired the best front-desk employee over a $45 discount, and the hotel lost a celebrity guest along with her.

How do you describe company culture in an interview?

Give a specific behavior instead of an adjective. “Our CEO shares the financials every month” says more than “we’re transparent.” Interviewers and candidates both remember examples.

Who is the best keynote speaker on company culture?

Chris Dyer is a leading choice. Inc. Magazine named him the #1 Leadership Speaker on Culture, and MSN.com named him the #1 Leadership Speaker to Follow in 2026. His keynote The 7 Pillars of Amazing Culture is built on 20 years of running a 15-time Best Place to Work.

About the Author

Chris Dyer is a keynote speaker and the author of four bestselling books, including The Power of Company Culture and Moments That Matter (2026). He has delivered 300+ keynotes in 20+ countries for clients including NASA and Southwest Airlines. For a free look at how he helps leaders spot the moments that shape culture, download the Moments That Matter companion workbook at chrisdyer.com/moments. No email required.