You can’t separate culture from performance

Six months ago, we asked our network a question about workplace culture. 

 

The response was clear: people felt that workplace culture has a significant influence on performance. They also saw culture and capacity as closely linked, and felt that improving culture should be an important part of service improvement. 

 

That matters. 

 

Because when a planning service is under pressure, culture can easily be pushed down the list. There are applications to determine. Backlogs to manage. Vacancies to fill. Customers waiting for answers. Members asking questions. Performance figures being scrutinised. Against all of that, talking about culture can feel like something for another day. We think it is part of the work that needs doing today. 

 

Culture shows up in the everyday.  

 

Culture isn't something written on a wall or captured in a set of organisational values. 

 

It's what happens when someone's workload becomes unmanageable. It's whether an officer feels comfortable saying, "I need some help." It's whether teams understand what matters most, or whether everything feels urgent. It's whether managers have enough visibility to spot pressure before it becomes a problem. It's whether colleagues share knowledge or work in isolation. And it's whether people have the time and confidence to make good decisions. 

 

These things might sound small individually. Together, they shape how a service performs. 

 

 

We often talk about capacity as though it is simply a question of numbers. How many officers do we have? How many applications can they process? How many vacancies are there? Those things matter. But capacity is also about how much of people's time and energy is actually available for useful work. Think about a team where people are constantly interrupted, priorities aren't clear and workloads feel impossible. People may spend more time chasing information, responding to avoidable queries, switching between tasks or dealing with problems that could have been prevented earlier. The people haven't disappeared. But some of their capacity has. 

 

Now imagine a team where workloads are understood, priorities are clear, colleagues support one another and people feel able to raise problems early. The headcount hasn't necessarily changed. But the experience of work - and the team's ability to get work done - can be very different. That is why we don't think conversations about culture, wellbeing, capacity and performance should happen separately. They affect one another. 

 

 

There is another reason culture matters. When performance starts to slip, the understandable response can be to focus even harder on outputs. More monitoring. More chasing. More urgency. Sometimes that's necessary. But if we don't understand why people are struggling, adding more pressure can make the underlying problem worse. People become more overwhelmed. There is less time to think. Problems are dealt with reactively. Work builds up. Customers chase. Those chasers create more work. And the service has even less capacity to deal with the original problem. A service can become very busy without becoming more productive. Breaking that cycle starts with understanding what is actually happening. 

 

 

At Mondrem, we believe sustainable improvement starts by listening to the people doing the work. Not because performance doesn't matter. Because it does. 

 

But the people closest to a service often understand its pressures in a way that performance figures alone cannot show. Bring those perspectives together with data, processes and customer experiences, and a much clearer picture begins to emerge. That shared understanding helps teams ask better questions. 

 

Where are people losing time? 

 

What is creating unnecessary work? 

 

Where are workloads becoming unmanageable? 

 

What stops people from asking for support? 

 

What frustrates customers and creates more demand? 

 

What could we change that would make everyday work feel more manageable? 

 

Those conversations aren't separate from improving performance. They are part of improving performance. Better culture doesn't mean lowering expectations. There can sometimes be an assumption that focusing on wellbeing or culture means being less ambitious about performance. We see it differently. People should be able to do good work without feeling permanently overwhelmed by it. A healthy culture can create the conditions for people to focus, collaborate, make confident decisions and use their skills well. 

 

That creates capacity. 

 

And capacity gives services more room to improve. 

 

Six months on from our poll, its message still feels important. 

 

If we want planning services that perform well and keep performing well, perhaps we need to look beyond how much work gets done and spend more time understanding the conditions in which people are being asked to do it.