How to know if your construction culture is working… and what to do if it’s not.

January 19, 2026

With 47% of construction professionals planning to leave within a year, culture isn’t optional. Discover if yours is working or costing you talent.

When we meet construction leaders, we start with two simple questions:

“Think of a time when your company culture was amazing. How did it feel? What made it great?”

Then we flip it:

“Have you ever worked in a toxic culture? What did that feel like, and how did it affect the people around you?”

The room usually goes quiet, because everyone has a story. Those memories, positive or negative, cut straight to the heart of what culture really is: the emotional climate people work within every day.

Culture isn’t a statement on a wall. It’s an experience. And in construction, where 47% of professionals plan to leave within a year, that experience determines whether your best people stay or walk.

Why Culture Feels Impossible to Pin Down

Workplace culture is one of those concepts everyone feels, yet few can clearly articulate. Ask ten people to define it and you’ll get ten different answers.

That’s because culture isn’t one thing, it’s everything working together.

In construction, culture is shaped by dozens of factors:

  • How leaders behave under pressure
  • Whether people feel safe speaking up on site
  • How teams communicate during high-stress phases
  • Whether good work gets recognized
  • How wellbeing is integrated into project delivery

Collectively, these elements determine the lived experience of your workforce. And that experience directly impacts productivity, retention, engagement, mental health outcomes, and how well teams collaborate.

Culture is powerful because it is felt immediately and deeply.

The 5 Signs Your Culture Is Working

How do you know if your culture is healthy? Look for these indicators:

  • People speak up about problems early When something’s wrong on site or in the office, team members raise it quickly rather than staying silent or waiting for it to escalate.

  • Collaboration happens naturally: Teams share information, help each other, and coordinate without needing constant management intervention.

  • Good work gets noticed: Recognition isn’t just about the big wins, everyday effort and improvement are acknowledged consistently.

  • Stress is acknowledged, not hidden: People can talk about workload, pressure, or wellbeing concerns without fear of judgment or career consequences.

  • People plan to stay: When you ask team members about their future, they see themselves growing with your business, not looking for the exit.

If most of these are true, your culture is working. If few are true, you’ve got a little work to do.

The 5 Signs Your Culture Is Broken

Toxic cultures show up in predictable patterns:

  • Information hoarding: People protect knowledge rather than share it, creating silos and inefficiency.

  • Blame culture: When things go wrong, energy goes into finding someone to blame rather than fixing the problem.

  • Presenteeism without productivity: People show up but aren’t engaged, going through the motions while quietly disengaged or looking elsewhere.

  • High turnover in specific teams: If one manager or department consistently loses good people, that’s a culture problem, not a coincidence.

  • “Us vs Them” mentality: Site vs office. Managers vs workers. Old guard vs new hires. Division becomes the default.

If several of these sound familiar, your culture is costing you talent and performance.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

Right now, construction faces cultural challenges that can’t be ignored:

  • High stress levels among younger professionals
  • Growing demand for psychological safety on site
  • Increased expectations of leadership transparency
  • Talent shortages requiring retention, not replacement
  • Greater emphasis on wellbeing and ESG outcomes

These challenges are cultural at their core and cultural in their solution.

You can’t recruit your way out of a culture problem. You can’t pay people enough to tolerate a toxic environment. The only answer is to build a culture where people want to stay.

Where to Start: The Culture Diagnostic

If you suspect your culture needs work, start here:

Ask these three questions:

  1. “If we lost our three best people next month, would we know why?” If the answer is no, you’re not paying attention to culture signals.
  2. “Do our managers know how to have difficult conversations well?” Poor manager capability is the fastest route to culture breakdown.
  3. “Can people tell us when something’s wrong without fear?” Psychological safety is the foundation, without it, problems stay hidden until they explode.

Your answers will show you where to focus first.

Three Actions You Can Take This Month

  1. Run the two-question exercise with your leadership team Ask about amazing culture vs toxic culture experiences. The discussion will reveal what your team values and what they’re experiencing now.
  2. Measure your baseline You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Use an engagement survey, pulse checks, or one-to-ones to understand current culture health. (Our Happiness Survey measures 18 engagement drivers benchmarked against construction standards, but any honest assessment is better than none.)
  3. Pick one priority and commit Don’t try to fix everything. Choose the biggest gap (manager training, recognition systems, communication, psychological safety) and make tangible progress there first.

Culture shifts happen when you’re deliberate, not when you hope for the best.

The Bottom Line

Culture isn’t abstract. It’s not “soft stuff.” It’s the system that determines whether your business attracts talent or repels it, whether teams perform or just survive, whether people bring their best or coast toward the exit.

In construction, where skilled workers are scarce and projects depend on collaboration under pressure, culture isn’t optional, it’s your competitive advantage.

When you shift the culture, everyone feels the impact. Morale rises. Collaboration becomes easier. Stress reduces. Leaders perform better. Projects run smoother. The business becomes a better version of itself.

That’s why we focus on creating happier cultures in construction, because when culture is thriving, everyone wins.

Want to assess your culture health? Get in touch to learn about The Happiness Survey and how we help construction businesses build cultures where people thrive.