Every organisation has two versions of itself. One exists in induction decks, culture walls and campaign briefs, and the other is what employees actually experience. When the two are close, culture becomes a source of trust, but when they diverge, the difference rarely stays internal for long.

Internal culture is not a communication asset to be activated when needed. It is the truth an organisation lives, including the smallest decisions that never become a press release.

Your employees are already writing the story

While organisations tend to assume their narrative is shaped by the latest feature story or campaign film, in reality, it is also being written in everyday moments, from onboarding sessions to corridor conversations.

It is shaped by employees who have lived through a restructuring, managed a difficult boss, or raised a concern that went nowhere.

Wells Fargo built its public identity around trust and relationships.

Internally, employees faced relentless pressure to hit cross-selling targets; pressure that led to millions of unauthorised accounts being opened, and eventually to a multibillion-dollar settlement with US regulators. The individual employees who opened those accounts were certainly acting wrongly. But the deeper failure was structural: an incentive system built to reward exactly the behaviour the company's public values claimed to reject. When an organisation optimises for one thing and preaches another, employees will eventually act on the incentive, not the poster.

This is usually how reputational damage begins. Not with a single dramatic crisis, but with a contradiction repeated often enough to become normal.

The culture of permission

A silent organisation is not necessarily a harmonious one. Silence often means employees have learned that raising concerns is unsafe, inconvenient, or professionally damaging.

Boeing's internal record around the 737 Max shows the same pattern. Employees raised safety concerns through internal channels; some were dismissed, and some who pushed the issue faced professional consequences. The formal channel existed. The permission to use it without risk did not.

This distinction matters. Psychological safety doesn't remove hierarchy. It gives people the confidence to raise concerns within that hierarchy.

A culture of silence can protect appearances for a while. But when information is filtered on the way up, leaders end up making decisions on a sanitised version of reality. Small risks stay invisible, and poor decisions go unchallenged. Problems compound quietly, until they're too large to contain.

Co-author, don't just curate

When a narrative goes external, the instinct is to curate it: send out the cleanest version of events, the most presentable story. Co-authoring is different: it means the people who actually experience the organisation have real influence over what it says about itself.

It's harder than curating, and it produces messier stories. It is also the only credible version. Surveys and town halls alone won't get you there. They collect input without closing the loop, and a loop left open is what people remember.

Closing it is a specific, repeatable act, not a mood. It means three specific actions happen every time, not just after a crisis: what was raised gets restated in public, so people know it landed; a decision gets made on it within a stated window, even if the decision is 'not now'; and the reasoning for that decision, including the parts that are commercially or legally inconvenient to admit, gets shared. An organisation that runs an engagement survey and publishes only the top-line score has collected input, not closed a loop. One that publishes what was raised, what changed, what didn't and why has done the harder thing.

Skip any one of these steps and the exercise becomes theatre, and employees recalibrate accordingly. Listening without visible follow-through eventually becomes just another form of messaging, and often a more corrosive one, because people can tell the difference between being heard and being managed.

Culture is the story, whether you write it or not

Culture shows up in how a manager delivers bad news, how a new hire is treated in their first month, whether difficult questions are actually welcome in the room, and whether leaders hold themselves to the standards they set for everyone else.

An organisation doesn't build trust by protecting its reputation from reality. It builds trust by making its reputation an accurate reflection of that. Internal culture isn't separate from the external brand. It's the evidence for it.

None of this requires a bigger budget or a creative campaign. It requires treating employees as authors rather than audiences: closing the loop instead of just opening it, admitting the parts that are inconvenient, and accepting that culture will be judged by what happens on an ordinary Tuesday, not by what gets said at the next town hall. That’s the only kind of narrative that will hold and the only kind that will actually shape how you’re seen from the outside.

The author is associate director, Pitchfork Partners Strategic Consultancy.