What the Best HR Leaders Do Differently When Culture Is Under Pressure
There is a version of culture disruption that looks dramatic from the outside — a merger announcement, a CEO departure, a return-to-office mandate that lands in the company Slack on a Tuesday afternoon. And then there is what actually happens inside the organization in the weeks that follow, which is almost never covered anywhere.
What happens is quieter. Employees start filling silence with their own assumptions. The questions they used to ask in all-hands meetings get asked in private (and often to the wrong person) instead. Survey participation ticks down — not because people have nothing to say, but because they have quietly concluded that saying it will not lead anywhere. A person who has been with the organization for six years starts updating their resume, and nobody notices until they give notice.
The HR leaders who navigate these moments well are not the ones with the best crisis communication plans. They are the ones who recognized, before the disruption hit and during it, that their job is not to manage the narrative. It is to stay in honest conversation with their people.
Here is what that actually looks like in practice.
They listen before they build
When a new HR leader steps into a role during a period of change — whether from a merger, a restructuring, or an executive transition — the instinct is often to bring a strategy. To demonstrate competence. To show the organization what good people operations looks like.
The HR leaders who build durable cultures do something different. They listen first.
One newly appointed chief people officer, stepping into a global role spanning 23 countries during a company restructuring, spent her first 90 days doing exactly one thing: meeting with every country leader, every functional leader, and every executive to ask the same set of questions. What should we start doing? What should we stop? What do we need more of?
What she heard in those conversations became the foundation of the organization’s four global HR pillars for the year. Not what she brought with her from previous roles. What the workforce told her was true about their experience and what they needed next.
“All of it came from the listening tour,” she said. Every priority. Every structural change. Every process she later rebuilt.
The listening tour is easy to dismiss as soft — a getting-to-know-you exercise before the real work starts. It is not. It is the most information-dense activity an HR leader can do during a transition, and the organizations that skip it almost always pay for it later, when the strategy they built does not match the workforce they were building it for.
They use honest data to make decisions — not to validate the decisions they have already made
There is a version of employee feedback that most organizations do quite well: collect it, summarize the positive findings, share the highlights, repeat annually. That is not the version that holds culture together during disruption.
The version that holds culture together is the one where leadership looks at the data honestly — including the parts that are uncomfortable — and builds its response and a reaction around what is actually true. Where declining scores are treated as information rather than a communications problem. Where the goal is not to present the best possible story but to understand what employees are actually experiencing and respond to it.
One HR leader navigating a leadership transition with no CHRO in place and a return-to-office debate already brewing described how over 1,100 employees responded to a culture survey during what she called “a precarious time” — more than many organizations see in stable periods. The participation itself was the signal. Employees were paying attention. They wanted to be heard. The question was whether the organization would do something meaningful with what they said. That is always the question.
They protect the manager layer — because that is where culture actually lives
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, released April 8, 2026, found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025 — the first time Gallup has recorded two consecutive years of decline. The primary driver was not front-line employee disengagement. Between 2022 and 2025, manager engagement dropped nine points, from 31% to 22%, while individual contributors held relatively flat. Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement.
What this means in practice: culture does not hold or break at the organizational level. It holds or breaks at the manager layer — in the daily interactions between people and the leaders closest to them. During disruption, that layer is under the most pressure precisely when it matters most. The HR leaders who protect culture through change are the ones who recognize this and invest in their managers during the disruption, not after it.
What holds when everything else moves
The organizations that hold culture through disruption are not the ones that manage change the best. They are the ones whose employees had enough accumulated evidence — about how leadership communicates, how feedback is used, how honestly the organization engages with difficulty — to extend trust even when the path forward was uncertain.
That evidence does not materialize during a crisis. It is built in ordinary conditions, through the consistency of how people are treated on a daily basis, and it is either there when you need it or it is not.
Most Loved Workplace® certification is one of the structures that helps organizations build and maintain that evidence — through honest, third-party-validated employee listening that gives HR leaders the data they need to respond to what is actually happening, not what they hope is happening. For organizations navigating disruption right now, it is worth understanding what the process provides and how it has supported other HR leaders through exactly these kinds of moments.
Learn more about Most Loved Workplace® certification
Louis Carter is the founder and CEO of Best Practice Institute, Most Loved Workplace, and Results-Based Culture. Author of In Great Company, Change Champions Field Guide, and Best Practices in Talent Management, as well as a series of Leadership Development books. He is a trusted strategic advisor and coach to CEOs, CHROs, and leaders of mid-sized to F500 companies – enabling change and steering employer brand development together with highly effective teams, leaders, and organizations as a whole.
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