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5 Signs of a healthy culture in life sciences
Culture is easy to describe and much harder to evaluate. An organization may have clearly defined values, strong employer branding and leaders who regularly talk about the importance of people. But these signals don’t tell you whether culture is shaping how work actually gets done.
In life sciences, culture becomes most visible during moments of pressure and change. Clinical setbacks, regulatory delays and leadership transitions can expose the gap between what an organization says it values and what its leaders, systems and incentives reinforce. And while these gaps become more visible (and problematic) in big moments, they also impact operations, employee experience and business results on a day-to-day basis.
The Culture at Work Study: Bridging the gap
bink’s Culture at Work Study gathered anonymous perspectives from 300 practitioners across culture, internal communications, HR, employee experience, leadership and organizational strategy. The goal: uncover how culture is defined, reinforced and experienced—not simply how employees feel about it.
Although the study was cross-industry, the findings have particular relevance in life sciences, where organizations routinely navigate specialized work, regulatory demands, rapid growth and high-stakes change.
One finding came through clearly: the gap between organizations where culture appears to be working and those where it continues to stall isn’t explained by company size or revenue. No single industry or job title predicts which cultural mindset respondents hold.
Instead, the study revealed four distinct mindsets about culture. One segment, which we call Culture Activators, represents practitioners reporting the strongest alignment between leadership behavior, organizational systems and stated cultural expectations. Their responses offer practical clues about the conditions associated with cultures that are working well.
Looking across their responses and the overall findings, we identified five practical signals leaders can use to evaluate whether culture is influencing how work gets done.
1. Ownership and accountability are clear
Healthy cultures aren’t delegated entirely to HR or internal communications. Every group has a role, and those roles are clearly defined. But too often, the work of operationalizing culture is given to teams or employees who can’t drive change on their own.
→ 55% of Culture at Work Study respondents agreed that middle managers are expected to drive culture change without enough support or resources.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
A biotech company says that collaboration is a core value. In response, internal communications launches a campaign highlighting cross-functional teamwork, and HR adds a competency called “collaboration” to performance reviews. But functional leaders continue to reward teams for protecting information and hitting isolated goals.
In this case, HR and internal communications are accountable for reinforcing collaboration, but they don’t have authority over the incentives undermining it.
A culture-driven approach would assign specific responsibilities:
✔️ Executive leaders align goals and incentives.
✔️ HR updates evaluation criteria.
✔️ Internal communications explains the change.
✔️ Managers reinforce the new expectations in team routines.
Most importantly, leaders must call out and correct individual and team behaviors that conflict with this value, even among high performers (more on this in a moment). In this instance, its leadership alignment between messaging and behavior that helps drive the change. And that’s true across organizations: leadership’s authority to set direction and priorities is necessary for any culture work to hold.
2. Leadership behavior matches leadership messaging
Healthy cultures have a narrow gap between what leaders say and how they behave.
→ 78% of respondents agreed that employees learn the real culture by watching what senior leaders tolerate—not what leaders announce or place in a values statement.
→ 91% agreed that a disconnect between leadership messaging and leadership behavior is one of the most damaging cultural forces inside organizations.
For example, imagine a pharmaceutical company that encourages employees to “speak up early.” But when a clinical team raises concerns that a timeline doesn’t allow enough time for the necessary review, leaders respond by questioning the team’s commitment. Employees move forward with the lesson that speed matters more than candor.
If leaders had examined the concern, explained the decision and acknowledged the tradeoff, they would have reinforced that raising risk is part of strong performance.
In an organization with a healthy culture, leadership explains how decisions connect to the organization’s mission and values. They call out when behavior is misaligned with these foundational beliefs. And they hold themselves to the same cultural standards expected of everyone else.
3. Culture influences decisions at the highest level
In healthy organizations, culture touches every aspect of the organization, from strategy to talent decisions and mergers and acquisitions. Culture enters the conversation before major decisions are finalized, not after leaders need help communicating them.
→ 56% of Culture Activators said culture is discussed frequently at the board level, compared with approximately 24% across the other respondents.
For example, a biotech organization is preparing to launch its first commercial product. Leadership focuses on hiring, systems, market readiness and operational timelines. But the company doesn’t discuss how its founder-led, research-centered culture will need to evolve.
As commercial talent joins, teams begin to experience tension around decision speed, risk tolerance and resource allocation.
A stronger approach would include culture in launch planning. Leadership would define the behaviors the next stage requires, identify which strengths need to be protected and clarify how teams should make decisions together. Culture would remain a topic for discussion at the very top of the organization on an ongoing basis.
4. The employee experience matches the culture the organization promises
Healthy organizations describe their culture honestly, every step of the way. The experience presented during recruitment closely resembles what employees encounter after joining, and cultural expectations remain consistent across the employee’s lifecycle.
→ 80% of Culture Activators said the culture described during recruitment matched what employees actually experienced.
For culture to positively influence employee behavior, it can’t be treated solely as a recruitment message or workplace perk.
If during recruitment, employees hear that the organization highly values collaboration, but information is closely guarded once they start work, the disconnect can reduce trust and engagement. Future culture messages might not be taken seriously or integrated into decision making.
Organizations with a healthy culture are honest about where the culture is today. Hiring managers and interviewing teammates understand the difference between cultural strengths, aspirations and areas actively being improved. They’re also given the tools to communicate culture and enforce it.
5. Culture is connected to performance, incentives and consequences
Results matter, but so does how those results are achieved. In organizations where culture is effectively operationalized, employees understand:
✔️ Which behaviors support the strategy
✔️ How cultural expectations affect performance evaluations
✔️ What the organization rewards
✔️ What behavior will not be tolerated
But this is one of the biggest culture gaps across organizations.
→ Across our entire study, half of respondents said high performers are sometimes, often, or always allowed to violate cultural expectations.
For example, take a pharmaceutical company that includes “one team” in its values. The values are on every office coffee mug and regularly brought up at all-hands meetings. But one of the organization’s functional leaders consistently achieves milestones without collaborating with regulatory and quality teams, creating rework, delays and tension later in the process. Despite the misalignment, leadership continues to reward the individual because the immediate results look strong.
A healthy culture would evaluate the full impact:
- Were milestones achieved sustainably?
- Did the leader strengthen or weaken cross-functional execution?
- Did their behavior increase risk elsewhere?
- Does promotion send the right message to the rest of the organization?
→ Read more: Culture by design white paper
A healthy culture is visible in the work
Culture becomes healthy when it moves beyond language and becomes part of the way the organization leads, decides, rewards and works. These five signs are all connected:
- Clear ownership makes accountability possible
- Leadership alignment creates credibility
- Senior-level attention connects culture to strategy
- An integrated employee experience builds trust
- Aligned incentives turn expectations into behavior
When you see these conditions in action, it means the organization has built enough alignment to navigate complexity without abandoning its commitments.
These conditions are particularly important in life sciences, where employees must collaborate across specialized functions, make decisions under uncertainty and balance speed, rigor, risk and patient impact.
The question you should ask isn’t, “Do we have a healthy culture?”
Instead, ask:
- What does our organization consistently reinforce?
- Where do employees receive conflicting signals?
- Which of these five signs is strongest?
- Which one is limiting the others?
- How can we fill in the gaps?
Join us on August 5th for The Culture Gap: New research on why culture work stalls and what actually moves it. We’re sharing the results of the Culture at Work Study—what the data shows, what separates organizations where culture is working from those still stuck and what it means for the work you’re trying to do right now. Register for the webinar here.
