Culture Audit — Know Exactly What You're Working With
Your organisation has a culture whether you've defined it or not. The question is whether it's working for you or against you.
Gugin's Culture Audit gives you a complete, clear picture of your organisational culture — the beliefs, behaviours, and dynamics that shape how your people actually work. Built on a framework developed and refined since 2004, it delivers the insight you need to make confident, informed decisions.
What you get from Gugin's culture audit:
The audit produces a detailed, actionable map of your cultural strengths and vulnerabilities — not a vague report, but a practical foundation for whatever comes next.
When it matters most in a culture audit:
Companies typically engage Gugin at critical inflection points — a turnaround, a merger, or an acquisition — when the cost of cultural blind spots is highest. The numbers are stark: between 55 and 77 percent of mergers fail to deliver on their financial promise, and the root cause is almost always the same. Leaders underestimate how hard it is to merge two cultures, and fail to plan for it systematically.
The result of a culture audit?
Internal confusion, turf battles, and an organisation turned inward at precisely the moment it needs to be focused outward. Momentum stalls. Value evaporates.
Gugin's Culture Audit eliminates that blind spot. Before the integration begins, you'll know where the fault lines are, where the strengths lie, and exactly what needs to be addressed to protect the value you're counting on.
The Gugin Culture Audit — Step by Step
Step 1: Pre-Assessment
Before anything else, Gugin works with you to define the scope and purpose of the audit. Every organisation is different, and every situation — whether a merger, a strategy change, or a performance challenge — calls for a tailored approach. The complexity of your organisation, the timeline, and the key questions you need answered are all agreed upon at this stage.
Deliverable: A customised audit plan with a clear scope, purpose, and agreed timeline.
Step 2: Data Collection
Gugin draws on the data most organisations already have available — employee surveys, exit interviews, external ratings, intranet resources, internal newsletters, and internal statistics. gugin This existing material is reorganised and mapped against the elements of Gugin's Cultural DNA framework. Internal stories, symbols, and heroes also get examined here, as they reveal a great deal about what an organisation truly values.
Deliverable: A structured inventory of your organisation's existing cultural data, mapped to the 17 Cultural DNA elements.
Step 3: Interview & Survey Design
Based on what the pre-assessment and data collection reveal, Gugin creates fully customised surveys and interview guides. Surveys are available on Gugin's extranet and contain a mix of multiple-choice questions, free-form answers, and ratings on a scale of 1 to 5, covering all elements of the Cultural DNA. Interviews can be conducted face-to-face, via video call, or by telephone — with face-to-face recommended where possible, as body language and environmental cues are also observed. gugin
Deliverable: Tailored survey questionnaires and interview frameworks, designed to surface both explicit and implicit cultural behaviours.
Step 4: Data Processing & Pattern Analysis
Once all surveys are closed and interviews completed, Gugin processes and evaluates the data. Survey results are analysed automatically where possible, while qualitative data is manually reviewed and categorised across the Cultural DNA elements. Gugin then looks for cultural patterns and gaps, particularly where a benchmark exists, and invites the client to a preliminary briefing of key findings to gather feedback. gugin
Deliverable: A preliminary findings briefing, including identified cultural patterns, sub-culture differences, and initial friction points.
Step 5: The Culture Audit Report
The full findings are compiled into a comprehensive written report. This is the core deliverable of the entire process — a clear, evidence-based picture of your organisation's cultural reality. The report covers your Cultural DNA in detail and translates the data into specific, actionable insights.
Deliverable: A detailed cultural profile of your organisation (your Cultural DNA)
Identification of cultural patterns and sub-culture differences
Prediction and prioritisation of cultural friction points and their impact on effectiveness
Specific recommendations for reducing or avoiding cultural friction
Recommendations on organisational adjustments
A road map for implementing the recommendations
Step 6: Implementation Planning & Change Process
The final step translates insight into action. The next steps vary depending on why the audit was conducted. If the goal is culture change, Gugin benchmarks the current culture against the ideal and develops change plans for each relevant element. If the goal is cost reduction, Gugin identifies the management layers producing the most cultural friction and develops plans to improve effectiveness — even in situations involving restructuring or redundancies. gugin
Deliverable: A tailored implementation road map with prioritised actions, change plans per Cultural DNA element, and clear guidance on what to address first to protect performance and momentum.
Book Dr Finn Majlergaard, CEO Gugin for a speech or lecture in your Company, University or Business school. He teaches at universities and business school across the world and has facilitated hundreds of workshops for more than 600 companies in 25+ countries
Why you should let Gugin conduct a culture audit of your organisation?
Gugin has conducted a survey among 1200 middle managers with the purpose to find out how important the corporate culture is to them ad what this corporate culture can do for them if it is done right
Here are som questions we usually ask to get an idea of the real company culture
- “What kinds of behaviour tend to be recognised and rewarded here — and what sort tends to hold people back, even if it’s never openly discussed?”
- “Can you think of a time when someone challenged the leadership team? How was it received?”
- “If I were to speak to someone who left recently, what might they say about why they moved on?”
- “What’s something people often grumble about internally, but that still hasn’t been properly addressed?”
- “If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about the culture, what would it be?”
- “Tell me about a time someone got something wrong here — how did their team respond?”
- “How do key decisions really get made — in formal meetings, or more informally behind closed doors?”
- “Can you name someone who seems to be genuinely thriving here — and what do you think is helping them succeed?”
- “Who tends to leave, and do any patterns stand out in their reasons for going?”
- “How does the organisation recognise when it needs to unlearn habits or processes that no longer work?”
- “How safe is it for people to say ‘I don’t know’ or ask for help here?”
- “What’s the biggest tension or challenge the leadership team is grappling with at the moment?”
- “Tell me a story about this place that would never make it into a recruitment brochure — but that sums up something real about the culture.”
- “What’s one of the unwritten rules here that new joiners often discover the hard way?”
- “If the company disappeared tomorrow, what do you think your people would genuinely miss?”
Motivation is more complex than most reward systems acknowledge
Many organisations default to financial incentives when performance stalls — bonuses, pay rises, perks. But money alone rarely solves a motivation problem. The reason is simple: external rewards cannot compensate for deeper cultural deficiencies.
When people are disengaged because of poor leadership, a lack of purpose, or feeling undervalued, no financial package will change that. In fact, layering rewards on top of an unhealthy culture often masks the real issue and delays the necessary conversation.
Effective motivation requires understanding what actually drives people in your organisation — and that understanding begins with a culture audit.
Dr Finn Majlergaard explores this further in his interview with TR2050:
Watch the interview
How does Gugin identify the cultural DNA in the corporate cultural audit process?
DNA is a molecule that encodes the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of an organism. We all have unique DNA. It is our biological identity.
Organisations are similar. They are all unique which is why we use the term the Cultural DNA when identifying and describing a company’s culture. Like the human DNA, the cultural DNA is made of components that have different forms from one organisation to the other.
We describe your organisation’s cultural DNA by assessing each of the elements in the DNA. In our model, we have 17 elements which make up the cultural DNA
Get started with your Culture Audit
Please get in touch with us. We will love to hear why a company culture audit is necessary for your organisation. Then we can share some of our experiences and ideas