28 October 2026 · 13 min read

When your values show up differently on every team

Values travel as words. The meaning does not travel with them.

So one pair of words can send three teams in three directions, and each team is behaving sensibly by its own lights.

Two words, three instructions

Marta spent four years in support at a software company of about a hundred and thirty people, and in March she moved to sales. Nothing about the values changed when she crossed the building. "Customer first" is still on the kitchen wall and still the last slide of every all-hands.

In her second week a prospect asks on a call whether the rollout could finish by the end of next month. Marta says what four years in support taught her to say: "Let me check with delivery before I promise that." Afterwards her new manager stops by her desk, kindly. "In here we say yes on the call and sort the date out after. That's customer first."

Marta nods. In support, customer first had meant the opposite: never promise what you haven't checked. Across the floor, delivery would give her a third answer, that it means telling the customer early when a date can't be kept.

Nobody is lying to her. Each reading was learned from the pressure on that team, and each makes sense there. Marta just feels she has changed companies without leaving the building.

Do company values show up in practice?

Marta is made up. The distance she crossed is measured.

31% of UK office workers in a United Culture survey say their company's stated values show in practice (United Culture, via HRreview, 14 October 2025). The survey covered office workers across the UK, the US and Western Europe, and 31% is the UK share.

That is people reporting on their own employer. A second study asks what the published words predict. Across 562 companies that published their values, there was no correlation between the values they emphasised and how their employees rated the culture (Sull, Turconi and Sull, MIT Sloan Management Review, 21 July 2020).

A third looks at the outside face. Only 18% of UK employees believe their organisation's external image and stated values are closely aligned (Nottingham Business School, via HRreview, 9 January 2025). That sets the public image against the values, not one team against another.

None of the three compares a team with the team next door. They measure the distance between the words and the experience, and say nothing about whether that distance is the same in every room.

That hole in the evidence is usually a hole in a company's own numbers too. A company-wide score is an average, and an average is the one reading that cannot show a difference between rooms, because the difference is what it averages away.

What inconsistent company culture looks like from the inside

An inconsistent company culture is values stated the same everywhere and lived differently in each room. The signs are small, and none of them will reach a board pack.

• "Them". People say "them" and mean another department.
• One word, two temperatures. The same value word gets defended in one meeting and shrugged at in the next.
• Asks become favours. A request that crosses a team line is put as a favour, not as part of the same work.
• Bad news travels and good news stays home. What another team gets wrong goes round the building. What it gets right stays in the room.
• Work gets reshaped on arrival. Something handed from one team to the next is redone at the other end, and nobody has asked why.
• The new joiner's answer. Asked what the company is for, someone three months in describes their team.

Why the same value means different things on different teams

My reading of the three together: a stated value is a sentence with no behaviour in it, and every team supplies the behaviour from its own week. Sales supplies it from the number due on Friday, delivery from the last date it missed, support from the person on the line now. Nobody sets out to be different. The meaning is picked up from the people sitting nearest, the way an accent is. None of the studies tested that.

An accent is the right comparison because nobody hears their own. Marta's new manager does not think she is offering a local reading of customer first. She thinks she is stating it. Each team's version feels like the plain meaning of the word, so the difference can run for years without an argument. All three teams nod at the all-hands, each picturing something else, and everybody leaves believing they agree.

What holds the accent in place is what each team answers for. When a word and a target disagree on a Friday afternoon, the target has a date on it and the word does not. If you want to know what a value means on a team, skip the wall and listen to what that team gets thanked for.

Who notices first: the people who cross a line

Anyone who stays in one room never sees any of this. Marta saw it because she crossed the floor. The people it reaches first are the ones who cross: movers, new joiners, and whoever picks up work from another team.

Ayaan runs delivery on the account Marta's manager closed. On Monday he opens the handover and finds a rollout date nobody in delivery has seen. In his team customer first means telling the customer early when a date can't be kept, so he rings them that afternoon. The customer says sales promised. Sales says that was customer first. Ayaan says the same about his call. One customer has now had two answers from one company, each given in good faith, each in the name of the same value.

New joiners meet it in a milder form. Nobody tells them there is a company's culture and a team's. They learn the team's and take it for the company's, which is one reason a jump in headcount widens the gap.

Are different team cultures a problem?

Teams are meant to differ, because different work needs different words. The trouble starts when nothing underneath is shared and nobody has looked to see whether anything is.

There is even a reason not to iron the differences out. In a field study of 182 work groups in a Fortune 500 telecommunications firm, sharing knowledge with people outside the group was more strongly associated with performance, as rated by senior executives, in groups whose members came from more varied locations, functions, managers and business units (Jonathon N. Cummings, Management Science, 2004). That is one firm, and performance there means executives' ratings. My reading is that variety is worth more when there are working links across it, which is an argument for building the links and leaving the accents alone.

So the test is not whether sales and support sound alike. They should not. The test is whether, when their habits collide, there is something both recognise that can settle it. A company with that floor can carry a lot of accents. A company without it gets disputes nobody can close, because each side is quoting the same value at the other.

The cost is easy to underrate because no line in the accounts carries it: the customer told two things, the hour spent reworking another team's report, the good person who concludes she has joined a different company.

Why a values poster and an all-hands do not align teams

The poster is the same for every team, which is the trouble with it. It says customer first matters. It cannot say what that rules out on a sales call. The 562-company result is consistent with this: the words a company published did not track how its employees rated the culture. Reprint the poster in new words and each team will read them through the same week it read the old.

The all-hands has the same shape. My reading is that it is the wrong size for the job. One voice speaks to a room of teams, each wanting to know what the value means for its own Tuesday. A leader can say what the company stands for. What a value means gets settled lower down, in the catch-up where someone says "just say yes".

The third easy answer is to make the teams alike, and it aims at the wrong target. What has to match is the handful of value words that cross team lines, so that each means the same behaviour in every room.

How to align values across teams

None of this needs a product. Three things for this week.

Ask one person on each team to finish the same sentence

Pick one value. Away from their lead, ask someone on each of three teams: "When did that value last decide something here?" Write the answers side by side and correct none of them. Three different stories show you where the drift is. A team that cannot tell a story shows you where the value is only a word.

Define the value by what it rules out

Take the same value and finish this: "Customer first here means X happens and Y does not." A value earns its keep by ruling something out; "we value candour" means little until it rules out the comfortable silence. Do it with one person from each team in the room. If the sentence cannot survive all three, it was describing one team.

For Marta's company it might read: "Customer first here means no date reaches a customer until delivery has seen it." Sales will object, and that objection is the conversation the company has been putting off for years.

Spend an hour in another team's routine

Sit in on a stand-up or a handoff on a team you rarely see. Notice one thing they are plainly good at, and tell them. You will also hear how they use your words.

The first is easy to do once. All three do their work when repeated, and a busy quarter is where repeating stops.

Questions leaders ask about culture across teams

What is culture fragmentation?

Culture fragmentation is when teams keep the company's name and stop sharing what it stands for. Each team builds its own vocabulary, heroes and priorities. It usually comes from slow drift rather than disloyalty, which is why nobody can name the day it started, and why a single announcement does not reverse it.

Why do company values not match what people do?

Mostly because nobody has said what each value rules out. A value with no behaviour in it cannot be broken, so it cannot steer anyone, and each team fills the gap from its own pressures. The 562-company result points the same way: the words a company published did not track how its employees rated the culture.

How can you tell whether values are lived across teams?

Ask for a story rather than a score. Ask someone on each team when the value last decided something, then compare the answers. Matching stories mean it is shared, different stories show where it has drifted, and no story means it is only a word. A company-wide average cannot show you any of this.

How MeaningFuel helps when each team reads the values differently

The daily insight: the same chosen list in every room

The company chooses its values and skills once, and each working day everyone gets one short insight on one of them. For Marta's company that might be Customer Focus and Teamwork as values, and Collaboration as a skill. Fragmentation itself cannot be chosen, because a problem is what a module is for.

In an ordinary week that puts Customer Focus in front of the sales floor and the support desk alike, on a working day and not only on the last slide of the all-hands. It will not define the word for them. What it offers is a small dose, repeated, which gives Marta and her old team something to compare.

The module: One Shared Culture

MeaningFuel has a module for this problem, One Shared Culture. A module is a short course of daily lessons for a team's named people: booked for a team by whoever runs the account or the team, it invites them, and those who join get one short lesson each working day for two weeks.

It is for a team that says "them" about another department, or whose value words mean one thing in this room and another in the next. One lesson takes the poster's problem head on: "quality" means double-checking in one team, polish in another and taking longer in a third, and each person defines the word by what it rules out. In the fifth lesson each person picks, separately, the three values from the company's set that they actually use to decide things. Then, at the debrief, the team lays the picks side by side, and the overlap, however small, is what they build on. Nobody is argued out of a pick, because the overlap is the information. The lead goes last, with their own.

The module draws on job crafting, the approach Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton described, in which people reshape their own work by changing what they do, who they work with and how they see it. Here that means tracing a task to the person it serves, building one working tie across a team line, and shaping a handoff around whoever receives it. The handoff lesson comes down to one question to ask before sending anything across: "What do you do with this right after it arrives?" Marta's manager could have put that to Ayaan.

What Insights can and cannot see across teams

Insights shows how much of each team takes part and how the insights land, pooled, with nobody named, so a leader can see whether the habit is alive on the sales floor as well as in support. That is as far as it goes. Two teams can take part equally and mean opposite things by customer first, and the model it works from is plain that an engagement signal cannot see what anybody privately believes.

The module is plain about its limit too. Where the split is built into the structure, with two products and two missions, say, that is a question for the organisation, and the module says so upward instead of trying to fix it with habits. It promises no outcome. And neither the insight nor the module will tell Marta's new manager what customer first rules out. Somebody in that company still has to decide.

The answer Marta is still waiting for

Her second week raised the question nobody had asked out loud: what does "customer first" mean here? The wall can't answer it, because the wall is never in the room when a date gets promised.

The test of a value is whether her new manager, the support lead and the delivery lead would give Marta the same answer in the same week.

• Company Culture
• Inconsistent Culture
• Values Not Lived
• Cultural Fragmentation
• Team Leadership