Why Most Company Cultures Suck

A Christmas Eve Speech

On Christmas Eve 1955, Adriano Olivetti stood before the workers at his factory in Ivrea, Italy, and said something unusual for a CEO. “I hope I have not ignored your aspirations, your desires, your needs. Because your pains, your suffering, your fears and your hopes have always been mine.”

This wasn’t a PR stunt. Olivetti meant it. He’d built something different—a company where workers earned the highest wages in Italy’s metal industry, where factories had glass walls so employees could see the mountains, where libraries, schools, a hospital, and mountain rest homes existed not as perks but as basic parts of treating people like human beings.

When WWII ended, the factory had a problem. The invading German army might steal the 5,000 typewriters the workers had produced. So Olivetti did something unusual: he asked his workers to take them home and hide them. Every single machine was returned. Not one was lost or sold on the black market.

That’s what trust looks like.

The Performance of Culture

The word “culture” gets thrown around so much it’s become meaningless. Every company has a “values” page now. Every startup talks about their “mission-driven” team. The language has been drained of substance, which is convenient because it lets companies perform culture without actually having one.

Edgar Schein, the organizational psychologist who actually studied this stuff, described culture as having three levels. The surface level is artifacts—what you can see, the office design, the language people use. Then there are espoused values—what the company says it believes. And at the deepest level, basic assumptions—the unspoken beliefs that actually drive behavior.

Most companies operate entirely at level one. They put ping pong tables in the break room and call it culture. They write inspiring mission statements and then reward the people who ignore them. They talk about “people first” while cutting headcount to hit quarterly targets.

The gap between what companies say and what they do isn’t a communication problem. It’s a design problem. You can’t fix a toxic culture with a new poster in the hallway.

What Olivetti Knew

Adriano Olivetti understood this. He was an engineer, not an HR consultant, but he grasped something that most executives miss: the product doesn’t matter as much as the people making it.

He wrote in 1945: “Work should be a great joy, and yet for many it is torment—torment of not having it, torment of doing work that serves no noble purpose.”

This was the 1940s. There was no LinkedIn thinkpiece about burnout. No wellness industry. Yet Olivetti built his entire company around the radical idea that work could mean something beyond a paycheck—that people needed to feel their labor served a purpose, that they were part of something worth protecting.

The “city-factory” he built in Ivrea wasn’t a gimmick. It was an integrated vision: the factory, the homes, the community, all designed around human flourishing rather than extraction. When workers felt ownership over their work, they acted like owners. When you treat people like resources, they respond like resources—transactional, disengaged, waiting for the clock to hit five.

What Happens When Companies Get It Wrong

Look at what happens when companies get this wrong.

WeWork built an empire on “elevating the world’s consciousness” while creating an environment so dysfunctional it collapsed under the weight of its own dysfunction. The culture wasn’t broken by accident—it was broken by design, because the product was always secondary to the narrative.

Twitter went from a place where engineers stayed for decades to a company that lost the majority of its staff in a matter of weeks. The technical product barely changed. The culture was gutted.

These aren’t outliers. They’re what happens when culture is treated as a brand exercise rather than a consequence of how you actually treat people.

The Data

The 2025 data is grim. Eighty percent of workers now describe their workplace as toxic—that’s up from 67% the year before. Seventy-one percent rate their mental health as poor or fair. These aren’t complaints from lazy employees. This is systemic failure.

What makes this frustrating is that the solution isn’t complicated. Pay people what they’re worth. Give them actual autonomy rather than permission-slip autonomy. Build environments where people contribute because they want to, not because they’re afraid of consequences. Treat humans like humans.

Adriano Olivetti figured this out in the 1940s without the help of a single consultant. He simply believed that people who are respected will protect what they help build. The 5,000 typewriters hidden in workers’ homes is the proof.

Most companies won’t do this. It’s easier to buy a nice office and call it culture. It’s easier to post values on a wall than to live them in decisions. The performance is the point, because actual culture change is hard and slow and requires admitting you’ve been doing it wrong.

But you don’t have to build a multinational company to understand this. You just have to decide whether you actually believe people are worth investing in, or whether that’s just something you say when you’re hiring.

Sources

Monster’s 2025 Mental Health in the Workplace Survey (n=1,100 workers). Reported by Fast Company, October 2025: “80% of employees say their workplace is toxic”