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The life sciences industry is undergoing unprecedented transformation. From mergers and acquisitions to a constant stream of new competitors and the demands of digital transformation, companies are challenged to evolve faster than ever.
At the same time, employees expect more than a paycheck. They want purpose. They want connection. And they want to feel engaged in meaningful work.
In this landscape, culture is no longer a “nice to have.” When intentionally shaped and consistently reinforced, it becomes one of the most powerful and most underutilized tools for organizational performance. It serves as both the glue that holds teams together and the compass that guides them through rapid change, uncertainty and transformation.
Culture drives performance
At bink, we help life sciences companies harness culture as a strategic asset. Especially in moments of accelerated change, culture is what helps employees stay grounded and move forward.
Whether you’re scaling a new therapeutic area, integrating global teams post-merger or responding to disruptive market shifts, culture complements your strategy. While strategy tells employees what to do, culture helps them decide how.
Yet many organizations struggle to activate culture in meaningful ways. It remains abstract, undefined or disconnected from day-to-day work. This white paper explores what high-performing cultures require: how they’re built, how they drive results and how they can be sustained over time.
Our approach is grounded in decades of experience helping life sciences companies navigate transformation and build cultures that thrive.
Read on and let’s make culture your competitive edge.
So, who owns culture?
Culture isn’t owned by HR, internal communications or even leadership. It’s a shared responsibility.
Leaders shape culture through their behavior and decisions. HR and internal communication teams reinforce it through systems, processes and messaging. But to truly stick, culture must be embedded in every corner of the organization, not rolled out in a splashy announcement or “launched” like a campaign.
Culture isn’t a one-time event. It’s a system that influences how people are recognized, rewarded and supported every day.
And here’s the truth: every organization already has a culture. The question is whether it’s being shaped with intention, or left to chance.
Ask yourself:
- Does your culture create a meaningful connection to purpose?
- Does it guide decisions when strategies shift?
- Does it give you an edge?
If the answer is “not yet,” you’re not alone. Culture often exists in the background undefined, unmanaged and untapped. But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Five steps to lasting culture change
Shifting culture isn’t about posters or values on a wall. It’s about engaging your people, aligning your leaders and building the systems that make culture real every day.
Here’s how to start.
1) Listen: Gather insights from your people.
Every culture transformation begins with understanding the one you already have.
Listening to employees helps reveal how work actually gets done, and where gaps exist between perception and reality. Use listening sessions, focus groups and surveys to uncover insights across teams. Don’t assume everyone shares the same experience because what happens in the lab may differ from what’s felt on the commercial floor.
Leaders and mid-level managers are also critical voices. Their perspectives can highlight cultural disconnects, spot inconsistencies in messaging and identify friction points in your systems.
When you truly listen, you lay the foundation for a culture strategy that’s realistic, inclusive and actionable.
2) Align: Partner with leadership to define a shared cultural vision.
Before you can build a high-performing culture, your leadership team must align on what that your culture should look like and why it matters.
This step isn’t about achieving consensus on every word or behavior. It’s about building shared clarity: What are we trying to create? How does it support our business goals? Where do our current habits help or hurt us?
Alignment among leaders ensures culture is consistently modeled and reinforced across functions. It also surfaces conflicting signals early, before they take root in the organization.
With the right alignment, leaders become champions of culture not just figureheads.
3) Define: Uncover and articulate the foundational elements of your culture.
To build culture intentionally, you need a strong foundation through your mission, vision, values and strategy.
These components likely exist in your organization already, but they may not be aligned, clearly articulated or meaningfully connected to how people work.
This step is about reconnecting those elements. It’s not just about rewriting your values. It’s about ensuring they inspire employees, reinforce priorities and serve as a decision-making compass in times of uncertainty.
When your foundation is strong, everything else like communication, behavior and collaboration becomes more consistent and effective.
4) Embed: Use strategic communication to build understanding, alignment and belief.
Once your foundation is defined, it’s time to bring it to life.
This requires more than a messaging cascade. Instead, you need a layered internal communications strategy that spans leadership meetings, digital channels, team huddles and micro-moments in daily work.
Effective internal communication does three things:
- Builds clarity around direction and expectations
- Fosters emotional connection to purpose and values
- Reinforces desired behaviors through stories, signals and systems
It also goes both ways. Feedback loops, pulse surveys and listening mechanisms help you adjust your approach and respond to the real employee experience.
When done right, internal communication doesn’t just transmit culture — it shapes it.
5) Sustain: Build the systems and structures that keep culture thriving.
To sustain a high-performance culture, you need infrastructure.
That means assessing the systems your people use every day from intranets and messaging platforms to recognition programs and performance management. Are these helping to scale culture, or working against it?
Look at key moments in the employee lifecycle: onboarding, development, reviews, mobility. Each is an opportunity to reinforce values and expectations.
When systems, programs and processes are aligned with your culture, it becomes more than an aspiration. It becomes an engine for clarity, performance and long-term success.
Culture is a strategic system, not a side project
At bink, we believe culture is the throughline that turns business strategy into real-world action. It’s what empowers teams to collaborate, adapt and move with confidence, even in the face of disruption.
When culture is strong and aligned, your people don’t just understand where the company is going. They know how to help you get there.
Explore our full white paper for practical tips and tools to activate each of the five steps and begin building a culture that drives performance.
Culture is your edge
if you build it right.
