Your Culture Survey Is Giving You a Number. Here’s Why You Need a Map Instead.

Author: Dr Anna Kiaos  |  Published: 23 February 2026

Every year, thousands of Australian organisations run an engagement survey, receive a score, and assume they understand their culture.

A 72% engagement rate. A 4.1 out of 5 on “I feel valued at work.” A slight uptick on psychological safety questions compared to last year. Leadership looks at the dashboard, notes the improvement, and moves on. Meanwhile, a team on a remote site hasn’t had a psychologically safe conversation with their supervisor in six months. A division that merged eighteen months ago is still operating with two competing sets of unwritten rules. A department is haemorrhaging experienced staff, and the exit interview data says “career progression” — because nobody feels safe enough to name what’s actually going on.

The survey didn’t capture any of this. It wasn’t designed to. This isn’t a criticism of the people running the surveys or the intent behind them. Engagement surveys were built to measure sentiment at scale. They do that well. But sentiment at scale is not the same thing as understanding where your culture is creating risk — and that distinction has consequences.

The averaging problem

Standard engagement surveys do one thing reliably: they produce an organisational average. They aggregate responses across every team, every site, every division, and every management layer into a composite score that tells leadership how the workforce feels in general. But culture doesn’t operate in general. It operates in specific, layered, and often contradictory ways — and the dynamics that drive psychological injury, chronic turnover, and genuine disengagement almost always sit in the layers that surveys flatten out.

When we average across the entire workforce, we lose the signal. We lose the team that’s thriving because of an exceptional leader and the team next door that’s unravelling because of an absent one. We lose the gap between how corporate describes the culture and how a night-shift crew on a remote site actually experiences it. We lose the fact that two departments in the same building can be operating under fundamentally different cultural rules. The average tells us something. It just doesn’t tell us enough to act with precision.

Culture operates at three levels. Surveys measure one.

Through my research, I developed the Culture Pressure Map framework to make visible what standard culture assessments consistently miss. The framework is built on a foundational observation from organisational ethnography: culture is not a single phenomenon. It is a system of pressure that operates across three distinct levels, each with its own dynamics, norms, and impact on people.

Level 1 — Organisational culture: the narrative

This is the story the organisation tells about itself. The values on the wall. The CEO’s town hall message about “who we are.” The strategic plan that describes the kind of workplace the organisation aspires to be. It shapes policies, recruitment messaging, and public identity.

Most culture work starts and ends here. Leadership defines the desired culture, communicates it through values and behaviours frameworks, and measures alignment through an annual survey. When the survey returns positive results, the assumption is that the culture is tracking in the right direction. That assumption is where the trouble begins.

Level 2 — Subcultural dynamics: the fault lines

Every organisation of any meaningful size contains subcultures. Divisions, sites, rosters, professional groups, geographic locations, shift patterns — each develops its own norms, often in quiet tension with the organisational narrative.

A mining company might espouse psychological safety at the corporate level while running FIFO rosters where the crew culture actively punishes vulnerability. A hospital might promote collaborative, multidisciplinary care while surgical and nursing subcultures operate with fundamentally different expectations about hierarchy, voice, and who gets to raise concerns. A government department might champion innovation while a specific branch has developed a culture of procedural rigidity that makes any deviation from routine feel career-threatening.

These subcultural dynamics aren’t visible in an organisational average. They require a different lens — one that examines how culture fragments and differentiates as it moves through the organisation’s structure.

Level 3 — Microcultural experience: where harm develops

This is where culture is actually lived. Not in the values statement, not in the divisional norms, but in the daily reality of the relationship between a manager and their direct reports. The unspoken rules of a specific team. The difference between what happens in the open-plan office and what happens behind a closed door. The gap between what a leader says in a meeting and how they respond when someone brings them bad news.

Microcultural dynamics are where psychological injury most often originates. They are also where standard surveys have the least visibility, because survey questions are designed to capture broad perceptions rather than the granular, relational, and often deeply personal experience of being in a specific team under a specific leader.

The gap where psychological harm accumulates

Here is the insight that has shaped every engagement I have undertaken since developing the Culture Pressure Map: the gap between the organisational narrative at Level 1 and the microcultural experience at Level 3 is where psychological harm accumulates.

When an organisation says “we value our people” at Level 1, but a manager at Level 3 is creating an environment where raising concerns is career-limiting, the employee doesn’t simply experience poor management. They experience a specific kind of cultural betrayal — the dissonance between what they were promised and what they are living. That dissonance is not merely demoralising. Under Australian WHS legislation, it is a psychosocial hazard. And it is one that no engagement survey is structured to detect.

Consider what a survey actually captures in this situation. The employee is asked: “Do you feel supported by your manager?” They give a 3 out of 5. That number tells you almost nothing of consequence. It doesn’t tell you that the score is a 3 because the employee has learned that a 2 would trigger a conversation they don’t feel safe having. It doesn’t tell you that the same employee would score the broader organisation a 4, because they genuinely believe in the mission — they just can’t reconcile that belief with their daily reality.

The Culture Pressure Map doesn’t produce a single score. It produces a diagnostic picture of where pressure is building, where the gaps between levels are widest, and where targeted intervention will have the most impact. It moves the conversation from “how do people feel?” to “where is our culture creating conditions for harm, and what is driving it?”

The regulatory question that changes everything

This distinction between sentiment measurement and risk diagnostics is no longer just an academic concern. It has regulatory force.

Australian WHS legislation now explicitly requires organisations to identify and manage psychosocial hazards in the workplace. The Codes of Practice that support this legislation are clear: organisations must take reasonable steps to identify hazards, assess risks, and implement controls. The regulatory expectation is not that you have a wellness program or an annual engagement survey. It is that you can demonstrate a systematic approach to identifying where psychosocial risk exists in your specific organisational context and what you are doing about it.

An engagement score of 72% is not a psychosocial risk assessment. It is a comfort metric. If a SafeWork inspector asks how you have identified psychosocial hazards across your workforce, a culture survey dashboard is not a defensible answer. It doesn’t show you where pressure is concentrated. It doesn’t differentiate between sites, teams, or management levels. It doesn’t identify the subcultural or microcultural dynamics that are driving harm.

Organisations need to move from measuring sentiment to diagnosing pressure. That means looking beyond the organisational average, into the subcultural fault lines and microcultural dynamics where the conditions for psychological injury actually develop.

From scores to maps: a different kind of culture work

The Culture Pressure Map framework is designed to provide the diagnostic depth that standard assessments lack. Rather than asking “how engaged are your people?” it asks a fundamentally different set of questions:

What is the organisational narrative, and where is it disconnected from operational reality?

Where do subcultures diverge from each other and from the stated organisational culture?

What microcultural dynamics are creating or relieving pressure at the team level?

Where are the widest gaps between levels, and what is driving them?

The answers to these questions don’t come from a survey. They come from diagnostic fieldwork — ethnographic observation, structured interviews, and document analysis — applied with the methodological rigour of academic research and the practical focus of an organisation that needs to act.

The output is not a score. It is a map — a detailed picture of cultural pressure across the organisation that shows leadership not just what people feel, but why they feel it, where the structural and relational drivers sit, and what interventions will address root causes rather than symptoms.

The question worth asking

If your last engagement survey came back with a healthy overall score, could you confidently identify which specific teams, sites, or divisions are experiencing cultural pressure that puts people at psychological risk?

Could you name the subcultural dynamics that are creating friction between parts of the organisation? Could you describe what is happening at the microcultural level — in the spaces between managers and their teams — that is driving the turnover, the complaints, or the WorkCover claims that keep surfacing despite the positive survey results? If the honest answer is no, the survey isn’t the problem. It is simply not the right tool for the question you actually need to answer.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has seen this gap firsthand — the disconnect between what the numbers say about an organisation’s culture and what people are actually experiencing on the ground. Where have you seen the biggest distance between the official narrative and the lived reality?

About the Author

Dr Anna Kiaos is the founder of Mind Culture Life Australia and a researcher at UNSW Sydney in the Discipline of Psychiatry and Mental Health. She developed the Culture Pressure Map framework to bridge the gap between academic research on organisational culture and the practical challenge of diagnosing and addressing psychosocial risk in Australian workplaces. Her work spans government, mining and resources, healthcare, and clubs and hospitality sectors.

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