Culture Check: Would your team pass the test?

Last month, I ran a three-day workshop series for a group of talented women who had just experienced an unexpected layoff. I planned content for the first two sessions and invited the participants to suggest topics for day three. I wanted to make sure the time we spent met their needs at that moment in time.

One of the things on their minds was ensuring a strong workplace culture in their next job. “I feel like when you ask about culture in an interview, you get lame answers like ‘it’s great’ or ‘we’re like a family here!’ How can we get a more honest answer from the people we talk to?”

The first thing that came to mind was that frightening job post ​I wrote about last year​. My sense is that anyone who is concerned about workplace culture is going to see the signs here and run the other direction. But most job postings don’t show their hand quite like this one did. In that case, how do you get a sense of how people treat one another?

Rather than asking, “What’s your work culture like here?”, you want to ask questions that reveal true company values, show how employees are really treated, expose toxic environments, and uncover leadership red flags.

Here are five questions I shared that can start to get under the hood of team culture.

1. Tell me about a recent team challenge and how it was solved.
2. How did the team celebrate their last big win?
3. What’s a recent change that has affected day-to-day work?
4. Can you share when employee feedback shaped a decision?
5. How does the team handle disagreements?

There is no right or wrong answer to these questions. But any one of them could provide some information and prompt you to ask more questions. For example:

• If the solution to a recent team challenge is overly simplistic and/or if the person conducting the interview can’t recall the last big win, you’ve learned something about team culture.
• The description of how a recent change affected day to day work can tell you whether leaders are thoughtful about change management and the impact of decisions on employees.
• Questioning how employee feedback shaped a decision forces them to show receipts rather than just making a claim that leadership values employee feedback.

In the workshop series this month, we walked through these and other questions and talked about what a promising answer would sound like and what responses would raise red flags.

As a former hiring manager, I thought a lot about how I would have answered these questions, and frankly it made me a little nervous! I don’t think I would have always performed well when on the spot like this. Which is why I always say these questions are not deal-breakers, they are conversation-starters. Elicit some information and then ask more questions. And trust your gut. You will know when a strong work culture is truly valued and when it is rehearsed and performative.

Do you think these questions could have predicted your last experience with toxic work culture? How do you think you would answer them about your current team?

Would your team pass the test?