Corporate culture

EY teams help organizations unlock the benefits of diverse, equitable and inclusive work environments. We use leading-edge analytics and data science to understand your current cultural landscape and put people at the heart of a strategic action plan to help you progress toward a more equitable future state, enabling culture to help you achieve the extraordinary. 

What EY can do for you

How businesses create and protect value is changing. Most of a given company’s value — 52% — now comes from intangible assets. But stating values is one thing; living them every day is another.

Corporate culture is defined by the implicit, unwritten rules that create expectations for how people behave. It is about the “how”  — how people collaborate, how decisions are made, how value is created and how people motivate each other.

That includes what’s celebrated, emphasized — and overlooked. Shifting these behaviours and promoting inclusiveness helps drive business performance. How? 

Corporate culture graph1

More inclusive corporate cultures generate innovative solutions, creativity and resilience. When your corporate culture is grounded in inclusion and psychological safety, you can attract, hire and retain top talent. All of this supports business outcomes, financial performance and sustainable, long-term value.

Our Corporate Culture teams can help you:

  • Carry out data-backed corporate culture assessments
  • Embrace specialized, digital tools to gain critical workforce insight
  • Make corporate culture enable business and strategic imperatives
  • Design strategies that create top-down buy-in and bottom-up alignment
  • Deploy actionable plans and roadmaps to drive progress
  • Create tailored solutions that comprehensively support and promote DE&I (including anti-racism, neurodiversity, accessibility and more)
  • Guide leaders in their role building and nurturing inclusive culture
  • Manage change thoughtfully and effectively across the enterprise

Our unique approach to corporate culture

We believe cultural transformation happens at the systemic and behavioural levels. To build a truly lasting culture of inclusiveness, we create systemic frameworks that address systems, policies and procedures. We also focus on organizational norms and individual behaviours. With a real business case at its heart, our approach helps leaders understand the relationship between cultural results and business outcomes, including improved financial performance and shareholder value. 

Connect culture deeply to business strategy, helping leaders understand its value as a differentiator and encouraging them to invest in the process. 

Collaborate with influential people at many levels of the organization to show leaders how individuals can help build, reinforce and evolve corporate culture. 

Explore what motives your employees to celebrate and build on organizational bright spots, and layer on small changes that drive behavioural change.

Address the inclusion aspects of corporate culture to foster diversity, equity and belonging across the organization. 



Throughout, we encourage uptake of the eight organizational qualities – adopted together- create ideal conditions to unleash human potential. This helps create a corporate culture and working environment where people feel a sense of belonging and are empowered to achieve their full potential. This helps create a corporate culture and working environment where people feel a sense of belonging and are empowered to achieve their full potential.

We call these the Great 8:

Hover over the image for more information on the great 8’s'

How we can help

Tapping into the potential of a diverse workforce

Supportive and accessible workplaces foster an environment where all employees feel valued, engaged and able to bring their unique skills and perspectives forward. Building this type of culture takes a proactive approach. It means engaging all levels of the organization.

At EY, we prioritize transformational leadership, high-performing teams and a fit-to-perform culture that encourages holistic growth for all. We draw on our deep DE&I knowledge to help organizations understand the benefits of creating a culture that benefits everyone. That means accounting for the needs and experiences of people from different cultural backgrounds, neurodiverse abilities and those with accessibility requirements.

This is how we help you build a culture that supports growth and success for all employees — and maintain it over the long term.

Our service offerings place humans@centre to shift behaviours at the systemic and individual levels and drive business performance.

Corporate culture graph 2

Our latest thinking

How to keep your people continuously ready for what is next

Learn why Companies should reskill and upskill their current people via continuous learning instead of hiring new talent to fill skills gaps.

Will the future of talent be shaped by the flow of an untethered workforce?

Work is less connected to old ideas of career, rewards and workplaces. Explore the EY 2024 Work Reimagined Survey for keys to a Talent Advantage.

How can reimagined mobility help organizations see reward and not risk?

Unlock insights from the EY 2023 Mobility Reimagined Survey showing workforce mobility’s reality doesn’t always live up to potential. Read more.

How the next generation will shape the next normal

Gen Z is the pandemic generation — transformed by COVID-19 and defining the world beyond it. Businesses need to understand Gen Z to thrive. Find out more.

    Contact us
    Like what you’ve seen? Get in touch to learn more.