Written by Coran Lui

How to build a workplace people love: your blueprint for a thriving culture (Part 2)

3rd November, 2025 •

Have you ever wondered why some teams just seem to click, while others struggle to get momentum? The truth is, even the best intentions won’t automatically create a thriving culture.

That’s why we developed our proprietary Culture Benchmarking Assessment, which measures organisations across eight pillars proven to drive engagement, performance, and wellbeing.

In Part 1, we explored the first four pillars that lay the foundation: involving your team in your business strategy, turning company values into action,, creating structured recruitment and onboarding, and investing in people’s growth and leadership development.

Part 2 picks up the thread with the remaining four pillars: engagement, feedback, fun & wellbeing, and inclusion. These pillars are about creating an environment where people feel energised, heard, and empowered every day.

Whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, read on for practical steps and client stories that will help you translate these pillars into tangible actions that make a real difference in your workplace.

5. Engagement

Think of a time you felt completely absorbed by a project, where you truly wanted to do your best work. That feeling is what ‘engagement’ looks like.

This pillar is about creating the conditions for that feeling to thrive across your entire team. It’s the deep connection an individual feels to their work, their colleagues, and a shared mission when they feel heard and trusted to make a meaningful impact.

To nurture it, you must first be able to answer: How are we truly listening to our team and creating a space for feedback?

Practical steps for turning listening into genuine connection:

Create a clear communication rhythm
- A predictable and positive communication cadence builds trust. At Higson, we create this consistency through weekly one-to-ones, monthly big team meetings, and quarterly strategy reviews.
Turn feedback into visible action
- After an engagement survey, share the key themes and stories with everyone. Most importantly, follow up by saying, “You said this, and here’s what we’re doing together in response.” This powerful loop helps build trust – we all want to feel we are being listened to and action is being taken.

6. Feedback

We all know feedback is essential for growth – but giving and receiving it is often harder than it seems.

This pillar aims to foster open, constructive conversations that drive performance and growth. Honest feedback is the fuel for learning. When you make feedback feel safe, kind, and normal, you unleash incredible potential, build trust, and empower people to solve problems at every level.

This means asking: What systems and stories do we have that encourage feedback, and are we brave enough to have honest conversations when they matter most?

How to build a culture of open and constructive dialogue

Celebrate learning from every experience
- As part of wrapping up a project, hold a retrospective to share stories of what went well, what was challenging, and what you’ll do differently next time. This reframes “mistakes” as powerful learning moments and fosters intelligent failure, a concept we love and apply in our work – read this blog for more.
Create a regular feedback rhythm
- To build on the point above, create a clear, documented feedback cadence. Include any formal touchpoints where feedback naturally fits – this might be one-to-ones, career conversations, 360 reviews, pulse surveys, and project retrospectives. Communicate the rhythm clearly so everyone knows when and how feedback happens, giving your team multiple opportunities to learn, adapt, and improve.
Train your team to master difficult conversations
- Giving feedback doesn’t come naturally to everyone; our instinct is often to avoid conflict, which allows small issues to grow and valuable opportunities for growth to be lost.
  
  Providing formal training is essential because it establishes a shared best practice and a common language for the entire team. It demystifies the process, making conversations clearer and more constructive, giving your colleagues the confidence to speak openly and honestly.
  
  One of our clients, a global digital marketing agency, wanted to strengthen their feedback culture and ensure every team member felt empowered to give and receive constructive feedback. We collaborated with their Head of People and Culture to create a structured feedback cadence, combining practical tools with interactive workshops. The outcome? Teams became more confident and aligned, feedback became a positive, actionable habit, and everyone felt equipped to contribute to a culture of growth.

Read our blog for more on the psychology of feedback and how to deliver it effectively.

Champion feedback in all directions

Encourage colleagues to share recognition and constructive feedback with each other. Normalise conversations about asking and giving feedback, and create ways to celebrate those who help others grow.

At Higson, one initiative that’s become part of our rhythm is a 360-degree feedback process. The team regularly shares feedback and sets focus areas, building accountability and ensuring feedback is not a one-off event but an ongoing practice.

7. Fun & Wellbeing

Guess how much of our life we spend at work? Around 100,000 hours!

With so much of our waking life spent at work, wellbeing has unsurprisingly become one of the top priorities for individuals and businesses alike. Nowadays, creating a positive and joyful work environment has become a true competitive advantage.

This pillar is about understanding how to support personal wellbeing and build strong team connections.

In a high-performance environment, intentional moments of joy, connection, and rest aren’t a distraction – they are essential fuel to help build resilience and camaraderie, ensuring people can work at their very best.

So, take a look at your team and ask: Are we creating joyful opportunities for connection, and how are we showing that we truly care for each other’s wellbeing?

Ideas to help you go from ad-hoc events to building a genuine culture of care:

Create a fun and wellbeing team
- Take the burden of planning off one person, and create a committee with individuals from different teams who can dream up inclusive events that appeal to everyone.
  
  Fun isn’t one-size-fits-all, so mix it up! Try lunchtime yoga or walking clubs for active minds, team quiz nights for the trivia lovers, mindfulness or meditation sessions for those who need a reset, or creative workshops like painting or cooking for people who enjoy hands-on activities. Small, varied activities make wellbeing and connection part of everyday work life, which we break this down more in this blog.
Champion proactive wellbeing initiatives
- Go beyond events and offer genuine support like flexible working hours, mental health resources, or “meeting-free” time blocks to give people space to breathe and recharge. Also, ensure you and your team are taking regular breaks – both micro, and macro breaks (read more on the difference here).
- Model the behaviour you want to see. For example, at Higson all new starters block out an hour for lunch from day one- and that practice is role-modelled from bottom to top. The same applies to holidays: managers sit down with their teams to plan time off together, ensuring everyone feels encouraged and supported to actually take their breaks. Small, consistent actions like these shape a culture where wellbeing is prioritised and felt every day.
Connect your organisation with a cause you truly care about

Make your social impact a source of team pride by partnering with local charities. This allows for meaningful involvement and tells a powerful story about your team’s positive impact on the world. At Higson, we’re incredibly proud to be charity partners of Cool Earth and Free to Be Kids, and offer a benefit that gives individuals paid time off to use their expertise to help charities and social organisations.

8. Inclusion

It’s well documented that companies with inclusive cultures are eight times more likely to achieve better business outcomes.

This pillar is about how you build a culture where every voice is heard, valued, and included.

Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is feeling you belong there enough to dance. It is the art of creating an environment where every single person feels safe and celebrated for their unique perspective, unlocking innovation and collaboration.

The ultimate question is: Are we creating a space where everyone can do their best work, diverse perspectives thrive, and our systems support fairness for all?

How to foster true belonging

Map your team’s sense of belonging
- You can’t nurture what you don’t understand, and research shows many people feel the need to ‘mask’ parts of who they are at work. Start by using practical tools like a belonging self-assessment to open up the conversation. From there, you can work together to build a team blueprint using frameworks like the Circle of Belonging – which this blog goes into more detail about.
Bring diverse voices to the table
- Ensure the teams making key decisions (e.g. from strategic decisions about business direction to who to hire) are a rich mix of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. For example, in important meetings you could use structured techniques like round-robin ideation where everyone gets dedicated time to speak, actively seeking input from quieter colleagues. Or when forming project teams, intentionally create a rich mix of perspectives by including people from different teams, levels, and experiences.
Design fair systems and processes
- Review your systems for hidden biases, such as job descriptions, promotion pathways, and performance reviews. From that, make your promotion pathways transparent to everyone and conduct regular audits of progression data to spot and address any disparities. In your performance reviews, implement calibration sessions where leaders discuss ratings as a group to challenge individual biases and ensure consistent standards are applied across the entire team.

Three key takeaways:

A great culture is built, not found. The most inspiring workplaces are the result of intentional choices. From embedding your values into daily habits to creating clear pathways for growth, every pillar requires a deliberate and thoughtful approach. The first step is often understanding where you are today so you can build the future you want.
Supporting your leaders is the most impactful activity you can do. Many leaders are promoted for their technical skill, not their ability to manage people. Investing in their development is a powerful act that creates a ripple effect of confidence, motivation, and psychological safety that lifts up everyone on their team.
Everyone is a culture-builder. While leaders do set the tone, culture is co-created by the entire team everyday. Equipping everyone with a shared language and skills for things like feedback and inclusion empowers them to contribute positively and turns your cultural aspirations into a lived reality.

Feeling inspired but not sure where to start? Or maybe you’re curious about how your culture measures up against the ‘gold standard’?

Building a culture you love doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

At Higson, we offer a proprietary Culture Benchmarking Assessment that takes the guesswork out of it. It helps you take a holistic look at your culture across all 8 pillars, shining a light on where you’re already brilliant at and where you have exciting opportunities to grow.

Clients we’ve run this with have found it invaluable for shaping their People Strategy. For example, one leadership team used the insights and recommendations from their benchmarking report to define clear focus areas for the year ahead, which became the foundation of their People strategy. The process not only highlighted organisational priorities but also identified development needs for leaders, which we then supported through one-to-one coaching.

If you are interested in learning more, please get in touch.