Make sure that the actions of your leadership team are consistent with your company values.Getty Images
Ask Women and Work
Question: Coming off the holidays, I feel like my team is in a bit of a slump, morale-wise. How can I improve company culture in 2025?
We asked Sarah Stockdale, founder and CEO, Growclass, to tackle this one:
The first thing to think about is making sure that the team understands your values and that the actions of your leadership team are consistent with those values.
Right now, especially in the U.S., there are forces that are pushing against things that your company may have talked a lot about in the past: diversity, inclusion, belonging, making sure that people feel safe at work. For a long time, it was politically advantageous and good company culture to have those things as core pillars of your organization. In 2025, we’re seeing a huge pushback against these issues, and some very large companies who built their company culture on these values are dismantling them less than a month into 2025.
So, do you have strong company values? And can your team trust that you are going to uphold those values?
It’s important to clearly communicate those values. I run a small company that’s around ten people, so we talk to each other all the time. But even for small businesses like mine, values should be documented so that leadership can be held accountable, so that we can ‘show our work’ and the rubric for making decisions.
For example, there are a lot of back-to-work mandates happening right now. A friend of mine is coming off maternity leave and she thought she had to be in the office two days a week. She just got an e-mail: it’s now five days a week. That’s a huge life change for her. She goes from having the flexibility to reintegrate into work in a way that feels good for her to being met with an absolute firehose of figuring out child care and how to manage her life.
If you want people to come into the office a couple days a week, that’s fine. But make sure you’re giving people time to adjust their lives to those changes. It’s about respecting your employees as people who can get their work done and make good decisions and not mandating company culture through control.
A big part of improving company culture is trust, and the way you build trust with your team is by consistently acting within the values that the company stands for.
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