Team Culture Workshop Design Tips
- Nancy Maher
- May 5
- 5 min read
Updated: May 6
When employees are strongly connected to their team culture, they are 3.7 times more engaged and 68% less likely to experience burnout. Workhuman-Gallup Research
Every team has a culture - a system of shared values, norms, and practices. Workplace culture, employee engagement, and leadership drive culture.
However, building a healthy team culture requires leadership support, intentional design, empathy, and continuous improvement. You are never done.
By blending human-centred design thinking with practical team culture-building strategies, you can create a team culture workshop that aligns your team around shared values and behaviours, fosters psychological safety and continuous improvement.
Here's our team culture workshop design tips, including ELMO, pre- and post-workshop surveys, and the 5Cs culture survey framework to establish a benchmark and measure progress after the workshop.
Contents
Pre-Workshop Survey: Understand Your Team’s Starting Point
What are the real issues from the team's perspective...not just the managers?
Before the workshop, distribute a short pre-survey to gather insights about the team's expectations and pain points. This survey helps tailor the workshop content to address real needs and sets a baseline for measuring change.
Key benefits of a pre-survey:
Assesses team members’ perceptions of current culture and collaboration
Identifies knowledge gaps and areas for improvement
Captures expectations and hopes for the workshop
Encourages early reflection and engagement
Keep the survey short and mix quantitative questions (e.g., rating scales) with open-ended ones to gather rich insights. Examples include: “What aspects of our team culture help you thrive?” and “What barriers do you experience in collaboration?”
Introducing PrinciplesUs Culture Assessment
In conjunction with the pre-survey, objectively assess and track culture, consider using the Culture Assessment or 5Cs culture survey developed by PrinciplesUS. This is a scientifically backed diagnostic tool for evaluating the multifaceted aspects of an organisation’s internal environment and team dynamics.
As a partner, we can incorporate this into our team culture workshops and engagements.
This framework evaluates five critical dimensions of team culture:
Clarity: How clear are team goals and roles?
Communication: How effectively does the team share information and feedback?
Collaboration: How well do team members work together?
Connection: How strong are interpersonal relationships and trust?
Commitment: How engaged and motivated is the team?
Using this survey before the workshop provides measurable data on team culture strengths and gaps, enabling targeted actions. You have a benchmark to run the survey progressively every six months to measure progress.
Use Design Thinking to Co-Create Your Team Culture
The workshop itself should follow a human-centred, iterative approach inspired by design thinking:
Empathise: Start by sharing and discussing pre-survey insights. Invite team members to openly share experiences and feelings about the current culture in a safe environment.
Define: Collaboratively identify key culture challenges and opportunities based on these insights.
Ideate: Brainstorm new behaviours, rituals, and ways of working that promote trust, autonomy, and psychological safety.
Prototype: Develop concrete team agreements, decision-making rules, and rituals that embody the desired culture.
Test: Commit to trying these new practices and agree on how to gather ongoing feedback.
This approach ensures the culture is shaped by those who live it daily, increasing buy-in and relevance.
Align on Purpose, Values, and Behaviours
A values-driven approach significantly influences team performance and productivity. A core part of the workshop is co-creating or validating the team’s purpose and core values. Interactive exercises ensure these resonate deeply and guide behaviours. This alignment is a compass for decision-making and accountability, anchoring culture in shared meaning.
Establish Clear Norms and Conflict Management Practices
Explicitly agree on expected behaviours and how the team will handle conflicts. Designing these “rules of engagement” upfront reduces misunderstandings and builds psychological safety.
The workshop allows the team to interact differently, especially if the team is going through some difficult times. So, the workshop is a place to role-model the behaviours you would like to see more of in your everyday interactions.
Workshop Rules We love
No laptops - be present
No talking over people
Practice listening
Be inclusive
Yes and...NOT No, but
Have fun
Use an External Facilitator
An external facilitator brings an unbiased perspective that helps create a safe, open space for honest dialogue. Their expertise ensures balanced participation, keeps discussions focused, and effectively navigates group dynamics. This allows leaders to fully engage without managing the process, leading to deeper insights, stronger alignment, and more impactful team culture outcomes.
Manage the HIPPOS
It’s REALLY important that the highest-paid person’s opinion (HIPPO) DOES NOT dominate the workshops. Creating a safe space where everyone’s voice is valued encourages open dialogue, sparks creativity, and leads to better decisions that reflect the whole team’s perspective, not just the leader's voice.
This is where an external workshop facilitator like Kinkajou can help.
Bring ELMO
ELMO, short for “Enough, Let’s Move On,” is a simple, playful facilitation tool used in workshops to gently stop discussions that are going too deep or off track. Bring ELMO and encourage the team to throw it when time's up for the activity, and we're going down rabbit holes. This keeps the atmosphere light and respectful.
Psssst - I also build in ELMO competitions - as everyone wants to take him to their next meeting!
Use Live Polls
As soon as people arrive, be ready with a live poll! It creates a talking point and some intrigue and sets the tone for a playful interactive workshop.
Tools like Mentimeter make it easy for everyone to share their thoughts in real time. They provide a quick snapshot of how the team feels, reveal different perspectives, and help surface honest feedback- all while keeping energy high and engagement strong throughout the workshop.
Set Expectations
The workshops are a catalyst for change. The real work starts once the workshops are over, in the team's actions to embody new behaviours. Team-building workshops do not fix team culture; a team culture workshop talks about real issues in a safe space so the team can decide on new behaviours and norms post-workshop.
Follow Up with a Post-Workshop Survey and Reflection
After the team culture workshop, send a post-survey mirroring the pre-survey and 5Cs assessment to evaluate shifts in perceptions and behaviours. Include open-ended questions that invite reflection on learnings and commitments, such as:
What new behaviours or rituals have you started practising?
How has your experience of team culture changed?
What challenges remain, and how can we address them?
Use these insights to refine culture initiatives and maintain momentum.
Embed Continuous Improvement Through Rituals and Feedback
Culture is dynamic. Design regular team rituals that reinforce desired behaviours and values, like check-ins, peer recognition, or innovation sessions. Encourage ongoing feedback loops to iterate on practices and keep culture alive and evolving.
In Summary
By thoughtfully combining human-centred design methods with clear measurement tools like the 5Cs survey and structured pre- and post-assessments, your team culture workshop becomes a powerful catalyst for lasting transformation. This approach ensures culture is not just a vague ideal but a lived experience that supports trust, collaboration, and high performance.
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