Your Culture Strategy Wasn’t Built for Nonstop Change
Challenging Culture: Gartner highlights culture atrophy as a major challenge for CHROs needing urgent attention by 2026.
Continuous Change: McKinsey states that organizations must adapt to continuous transformation, not just isolated changes.
Infrastructure Gap: Traditional annual employee surveys are too slow for organizations facing rapid and continuous changes.
Candor Mechanism: Garner Health uses continuous, transparent feedback to institutionalize culture beyond annual reviews.
Stewardship Role: Building development-focused infrastructure, not just managing change, defines the future importance of HR.
Gartner surveyed 426 CHROs across 23 industries last year and came back with four priorities for 2026. Three read like updates to problems HR has been managing for years: build an AI strategy, plan for a blended human-AI workforce, get leaders to treat change as routine instead of exceptional.
The fourth is different. Gartner calls it culture atrophy, and it names something a growing number of CHROs have been describing in less clinical terms for at least two years, the sense that culture used to hold an organization together, and now it doesn't, and nobody's entirely sure when that changed.
The data behind the label isn't subtle. Only 47% of CHROs say their culture drives performance today. Less than half of employees, 43%, believe their culture actually helps them succeed.
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Gartner describes the current employment relationship as a "give more, expect less" arrangement. Longer hours, heavier workloads, less flexibility, less job security, delivered without the empathy-forward language that defined the post-pandemic employer pitch.
Employees notice the distance between what companies say about their values and what they experience day to day, and that distance is what atrophy actually feels like from the inside.
Naming it is useful. It gives CHROs a term their boards will recognize and a mandate that shows up in a Gartner deck instead of an HR anecdote. But naming a problem and understanding its mechanism are different accomplishments, and the mechanism is what I find interesting.
The Regeneration Model
When transformation doesn't end, there's no steady state to return to. The program keeps running against a target that keeps moving. That's not a failure of execution.
McKinsey's State of Organizations 2026 research, drawn from more than 10,000 senior executives across 15 countries, contains a line that I think is key to the culture atrophy conversation: transformation is becoming a permanent condition.
This is not a phase and it definitely isn't a project with a start date and an end date and a change management plan that expires when the new org chart takes effect. We're talking about a continuous operating state.
McKinsey's own term for it is "business as change," and the report is direct about what that requires. Change built into the operating model, not bolted onto it.
Most culture work currently in place at large organizations wasn't built for that. It was built for a model where transformation arrived in discrete waves, a merger, a new CEO, a digital transformation initiative with a three-year roadmap.
Culture regeneration programs, engagement surveys tied to annual cycles, values refreshes timed to leadership transitions, all of it assumes there's a stable baseline to return to once the disruption passes. Run the program, absorb the shock, get back to steady state, rebuild what strained during the transition.
When transformation doesn't end, there's no steady state to return to. The program keeps running against a target that keeps moving. That's not a failure of execution. It's a design mismatch, and it's worth looking at, because the instinct inside most HR functions right now is to read culture atrophy as evidence they haven't been doing culture work well enough.
The McKinsey framing suggests they may have been doing culture work exactly as designed for a world that has stopped existing.
The scale of the miss shows up in McKinsey's own performance-culture numbers. Seventy-five percent of organizations are failing to build what the report calls a high-performance culture, and less than a quarter are seeing durable impact from the efforts they're making.
The barriers executives cite most often, limited career progression and a lack of targeted incentives, are the kind of things a well-run annual program is supposed to fix. That they persist at this scale, across a ten-thousand-person sample, says the program itself is the wrong shape for the problem.
What Broke?
John Moore spent decades as a senior operating executive at two of the world's largest companies before founding a company that builds tools for measuring employee state of mind in real time.
His current business has an obvious stake in the argument he makes. But the account of what he ran as an executive, before he was selling anything, is worth noting here.
His teams did what most large organizations still do: an annual employee survey, aggregated into themes, translated into a company-wide program. If communication issues bubbled up as a theme, HR rolled out a communications initiative everywhere at once. Moore watched this go wrong in a specific way.
The risk to the enterprise is you’re not addressing the real problem at the work unit level. A team might be dealing with something the aggregate data never surfaced, while corporate rolls out training for a problem that team doesn’t have. You may be actually not addressing the issue at the micro level and you risk coming across as tone deaf.
The deeper problem, in his account, wasn't that leaders were reading the data wrong. It's that the data arrived too slowly to matter.
"I get forecast to close on my sales pipeline for the month, for the quarter. I get my staff utilization rates, quality indicators. It's all coming at me in real time, on my cell phone," Moore said, describing his years running a consulting practice. "My employee survey data, arguably the most important asset I've got, I get virtually none of it in real time. The traditional annual employee survey, in my mind, is broken. It doesn't work."
That's the mechanism McKinsey's research points to from the outside, described from the inside by someone who ran the program. An annual cadence assumes the organization can afford to wait a year to find out something is wrong. Under continuous transformation, a year is several change cycles too late.
What Continuous Infrastructure Looks Like
Valentina Gissin, Chief People Officer at Garner Health, didn't set out to build a culture program that runs at the speed McKinsey's research says is now required. She set out to avoid the version of culture work she considers cosmetic.
"It is not simply writing down your values and putting them on the wall of your cool office and using them for shout-outs in town halls every other week," she said
What she built instead is, functionally, the continuous system the culture atrophy research is asking for.
The clearest example is candor. Rather than treating feedback as an annual review event, Garner publishes peer and upward feedback company-wide.
That mechanism is more powerful in institutionalizing culture than me talking about candor for hours and hours.
The logic is structural rather than inspirational.
"It makes it very difficult, in light of that environment, to justify sitting on feedback for the rest of the year," she said.
Culture also isn't treated as separate from performance infrastructure. Values get translated into competencies mapped to what success looks like at each level, from the CEO down to a line supervisor, and those competencies live inside the same performance system that tracks output.
New hires get a culture case-study session, 90 minutes, in their first 30 days, built around scenarios specific enough that someone from outside the company has to genuinely work through them. A second, deeper version lands around month three or four. None of it is positioned as a one-time onboarding event that culture work checks off and moves past.
This wasn't frictionless. Publishing 360 feedback drew real pushback, some of it philosophical (why would you do this at all), some of it panicked (new hires who'd already submitted reviews trying to go back and rewrite them once they realized the reviews would be visible).
Gissin's response to the second kind was procedural. Normalize it early enough, in hiring, so that people self-select. Garner's interviews are built to give candidates real, specific, sometimes uncomfortable feedback in the moment, and some candidates opt out after experiencing it.
People don't want to be in a culture where you could be given feedback during an interview," she said. "They probably don't want to be in our culture.
She also carries a specific, hard-won caution from her time at Bridgewater, an organization built almost entirely around radical, continuous feedback. Bridgewater got real things right, in her account. Reward the voice regardless of who's speaking, normalize truth-telling at every level.
What made it corrosive for many people wasn't the volume of feedback. It was that the feedback got used to permanently label people rather than help them develop.
"The assessment approach was geared towards the fixed mindset," she said. Someone flagged as a weak conceptual thinker in one meeting could be marked that way in the system indefinitely, a verdict rather than a data point. Gissin kept the continuous, high-volume feedback loop when she left. She deliberately left the fixed-trait labeling behind.
That distinction matters for anyone trying to build the kind of always-on culture infrastructure this moment calls for. Continuous feedback isn't automatically healthier than the annual version. It just fails differently, and faster, if the underlying intent is judgment instead of development.
The Reframe
Gartner's advice to CHROs is to embed culture into daily work rather than treating it as a program layered on top of operations. That's the right direction, and Moore's and Gissin's accounts show what it actually requires in practice.
It means the systems that sense culture, listening infrastructure, manager feedback loops, recognition mechanisms, have to run at the same speed as the change itself. Right now, in most organizations, they don't.
Change moves in weeks. Culture measurement moves in quarters or years, and the leaders responsible for syncing them up are, by Gartner's own numbers, doing so while less than half of them believe their current culture is even driving performance.
There's a version of this moment where HR treats AI-driven disruption purely as an operating problem, something to be managed with the same efficiency logic applied to a supply chain.
Gissin and Moore both describe something closer to stewardship, building the infrastructure that lets people actually develop inside continuous change instead of just surviving it.
That distinction, between managing a workforce through disruption and helping people build the capacity to meet it, is likely to define which HR functions matter over the next decade and which get treated as a cost center to automate around.
This doesn’t mean running more culture surveys or launching another values campaign. This requires rebuilding the underlying architecture so that what the organization learns about its own culture arrives fast enough to act on, before the next wave of change has already made the data obsolete.
That's harder and less visible than a rebrand or a town hall. It's also the only version of this work built for the world McKinsey and Gartner are both now describing as permanent.
