Ontario Municipal Human Resources Association

Anthropology, as a scientific discipline, evolved out of curiosity to study what makes one group of people different from another: their rituals, their kinship systems and the symbolism built into their language and cuisine. Culture is the essence of diversity, the essence of what separates us.

And yet, in the past few weeks, the world has been united, approximately ninety minutes at a time. Berlin, Buenos Aires, Boston, Bengaluru – it doesn’t matter where – a fan holds their breath in the same second before a penalty kick, and is instantly animated when the ball makes contact with the net. For all the fanfare it receives as a diversity platform, the FIFA World Cup does a phenomenal job of stripping away our differences to reveal our most basic, human emotions in a shared experience. When the stakes are real, the rules are the same for everyone, and the moment is allowed to breathe, unscripted, it produces something universal without the assist from a campaign, branding exercise, or proclamation.

At the workplace, we rarely offer people that kind of moment. Instead, we package it into what is believed to be the least-friction, most-declarable approach: the values poster, the employee survey, the mandatory training program, the culture initiative. If these hit a nerve, I invite you to reflect on why. The reason, simple albeit uncomfortable to admit, is that real culture-building costs something.

Culture, as it turns out, isn’t free. The cost isn’t to the organization’s balance sheet. It’s in the opportunity cost of the harder conversation, the fairer decision, the benefit of doubt, the compassion, and the vulnerability to admit when you don’t have the answer. It is in noticing who isn’t in the room as much as who is. None of it shows up on an invoice. And when you pay the cost of culture-building, these choices will, most inconveniently, dissolve into everyday context without much of a trace. No one timestamps the moment a leader chose compassion over convenience.

At least sport lets us see this tension play out in the open. Consider VAR, the video assistant referee system introduced in 2018 to make officiating more accurate and more defensible. Almost a decade later, fans will tell you that VAR often makes the experience worse even when the fairness metric has objectively improved. Map this back to employee experience and there is a clear parallel: a survey score can rise, a training module can show full completion, but neither one truly establishes whether the behaviours and norms they targeted actually changed in the moments that mattered thereafter.

Culture, in other words, isn’t measured in metrics, but in experience. Which brings us back to that penalty kick, the purest test of nerve in sport. Call it a kicker-vs-keeper showdown. Pull the frame outward though, and the moment stops being about two players and a referee. It becomes the manifestation of a hundred choices made by everyone around them, whether it is the substitute that never set foot on the pitch, the coach, the kit staff, the delegation that accompanied them to the World Cup or the nation that sent them. Sometimes these choices are invisible, dissolved away in logistics that have no direct line of sight to the game. Norway shipped three chefs and over 500 kilograms of food across an ocean just to keep their players eating what they always have. At the workplace, this is the manager who preps a nervous team member before they present to leadership, or the colleague who quietly covers a shift so someone can make it to a school event. Culture is not one person’s cause. It compounds, or doesn’t, depending on how many people believe in it. It is the discipline of doing the invisible part well, whether or not anyone asked you to.

So the next time you have the chance to do the harder, quieter thing, it’s worth taking. Repeated by enough people,that’s usually the difference between a culture that compounds and one people just tolerate.

Written by: Evelyn Poonolly, CHRL, SPHRi, Prosci Manager, Organizational Effectiveness, Town of Caledon