25 Inspirational Company Culture Quotes to Motivate You

Workplace culture can make or break an organisation. It can be the difference between an engaged and an actively disengaged employee. Whether you’re a start-up wanting to establish a welcoming company culture or you’re an established business seeking to make a change, these company culture quotes will inspire you.

A great business leader knows that, ultimately, a company’s success depends on its employees. These are the people who work hard every day to push the business forward. Without them, no business would be able to compete or achieve its organisational objectives. Our company vision and our products and services are important — but they are ultimately useless without an engaged team at the helm.

This is why forward-thinking companies work hard to create an engaging organisational culture. Your workplace culture shapes the employee experience. It emerges from the company’s values, goals, mission and expectations. When you have the right culture, and you provide the means for your employees to thrive and grow, the world is your oyster. Voluntary turnover will drop, engagement levels will increase and you’ll be more appealing to prospective top-performing employees.

Of course, as with many things in life and business, hardly anything is as straightforward as we would like. There is no clear cut definition of company culture, nor is there a recipe book for us to follow to create our ideal workplace culture. But we do have motivating culture quotes and examples of company culture to help guide our efforts. 

Below, we’ve shared 25 of our favourite workplace culture quotes.

1. ‘Culture is not an initiative. Culture is the enabler of all initiatives.’ — Larry Senn

This is a great insight from Larry Senn, a pioneer in the field of corporate culture. With this quote, Larry discusses the fact that changes in company culture are often perceived as a long and arduous undertaking. Larry’s response is that culture in itself is not an “initiative”. It facilitates current and future initiatives. Once you get company culture right, decisions flow faster. Ideas flow better. You make future change more likely and easier. Working towards the right company culture might not be an easy task, but it is certainly one that will pay off.

2. ‘Culture is about performance and making people feel good about how they contribute to the whole.’ — Tracy Streckenbach

With this culture quote, Tracy Streckenbach highlights that human beings are naturally tribal. We enjoy a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose. We enjoy being part of something bigger than ourselves.

In large part, company culture is about helping employees feel good about the work they do and understand how their efforts move the organisation forward. Companies with a supportive, positive culture are usually successful in this area. With your company culture, you need to focus on your team. You need to get everyone on the same page and get them united behind a common goal.

3. ‘Culture is to recruiting as product is to marketing.’ — HubSpot’s Culture Code

Customers are going to be attracted to a great product. Talented employees are going to be attracted to a great culture. This is something we need to keep in mind as the war for talent continues. 

Top talent has a choice and candidates are ultimately going to jump on board with a company that takes its culture seriously. This doesn’t mean you have to offer lavish perks. Your company just needs a real sense of self and to show employees that they are appreciated and valued. This concept is so important that it has made it into HubSpot’s Culture Code.

4. ‘Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with a passion.’ — Brian Chesky, Co-Founder, CEO, Airbnb

This quote by Brian Chesky attempts to summarise company culture and what it’s all about. Although we can’t possibly reduce company culture down to one soundbite, Brian might have a point in that at its heart, culture is about collaboration and united passion. To build a great company culture, you need to have a host of motivated and enthusiastic performers to support it. No man is an island — the best company cultures bring everyone together and give them something real to care about.

5. ‘Being a great place to work is the difference between being a good company and a great company.’ — Brian Kristofek, President and CEO, Upshot

With this quote, Brian Kritofek hints at all the benefits that come with a great company culture — increased employee engagement, an improved employee experience, more passion, and enthusiasm from your teammates. A great company culture can attract the best and brightest and it can improve retention rates. When people love where they work, great things follow — for everyone involved.

6. ‘We believe that it’s really important to come up with core values that you can commit to. And by commit, we mean that you’re willing to hire and fire based on them. If you’re willing to do that, then you’re well on your way to building a company culture that is in line with the brand you want to build.’ — Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos

Tony Hsieh is someone who understands the importance of company values and the necessity to hire based on cultural fit. You can hire the most impressive, best-qualified candidates available, but if their values fly in the face of everything your company believes in, they aren’t going to be an asset. In fact, they might send your company down a road it isn’t comfortable with.

Values are a central part of company culture and an element that needs to be well-communicated and respected. Leaders need to exemplify values — they need to be on display and you need to feel confident hiring, and firing, based on these well-considered values.

7. ‘Corporate culture is the only sustainable competitive advantage that is completely within the control of the entrepreneur.’ — David Cummings, Co-Founder, Pardot

As David Cummings says, so much about business is unpredictable. You never really know what your profits and losses are going to look like. You can’t accurately predict what the market will look like even a year from now. But what you can control is your company culture. You can look after your culture and your people, and ultimately, you will reap the benefits.

8. ‘Starbucks was founded around the experience and the environment of their stores. Starbucks was about a space with comfortable chairs, lots of power outlets, tables and desks at which we could work and the option to spend as much time in their stores as we wanted without any pressure to buy. The coffee was incidental.’ — Simon Sinek, Author, Motivational Speaker and Marketing Consultant

Company culture can’t be copied and pasted from organisation to organisation. As Simon Sinek says, your company culture needs to be individual and meaningful. It needs to be identifiable and unique. And although, of course, success in terms of services and goods is important, what’s truly crucial is the culture behind it that is driving its success.

9. ‘Once you have an innovation culture, even those who are not scientists or engineers — poets, actors, journalists — they […] embrace the concept of an innovation culture. They vote in ways that promote it. They don’t fight science and they don’t fight technology.’ — Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist, Cosmologist, Author, and Science Communicator

Neil deGrasse Tyson emphasises here the importance of innovation to any organisation. Innovation as a company value can help your organisation thrive, advance and remain competitive. Companies with innovative cultures are more likely to be creative and come up with out-of-the-box solutions to complicated problems. They are also more likely to accept change and advancement in its many forms.

10. ‘A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Lack of candour, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments.’ — Ed Catmull, President of Pixar

As the president of an internationally successful animated studio, Ed Catmull knows a lot about creativity. Companies with creative cultures open themselves to new ideas and ways of doing things. They are companies that are able to assess existing systems and procedures and overhaul them if they don’t match the organisation’s standards. To be truly creative, however, employees need to be emboldened to speak up. If they are shot down every time they have a suggestion for change, or if these changes are simply paid lip service to and never enacted, creative employees will learn that there is no sense in speaking up.

11. ‘Employees are a company’s greatest asset – they’re your competitive advantage. You want to attract and retain the best; provide them with encouragement, stimulus and make them feel that they are an integral part of the company’s mission.’ — Anne M. Mulcahy

How do you keep your employees happy? How do you make sure they’re actually engaged? With the latest trend of quiet quitting and essentially doing the bare minimum, employers around the world are asking these questions in an attempt to get their employees to go the extra mile. One effective way of enriching your company culture and motivating your team is to give them something to care about; something to actively work toward. 

Employees these days want much more than a paycheck when they turn up to work. They want a sense of purpose; a mission. From day one, employees should be filled in on the company’s mission. Employees need to be told what it is, how far you have come, what you are doing to work towards achieving it and, importantly, how their role is important in making it a reality. An employee who feels like a meaningless cog in a machine won’t shine the way you want them to.

12. ‘Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield.’ — Marcus Buckingham, Author and business consultant

This company culture quote speaks directly to the importance of prioritising training and development — something Forbes has stated is now a competitive differentiator. Top performers want to better themselves. They want to advance, to learn more and to thrive. They also want to be with companies whose company culture encourages such development. And, after all, the ultimate beneficiary of this training and development will be your company. Build this into your company culture and you will reap the rewards.

13. ‘[High performers don’t] like a lot of unnecessary processes and rules, which is why entrepreneurs have to let high performance people make decisions. If you trust them with your mission and with hundreds of important daily choices, you can also trust them to handle their vacation schedule, their paid time off, and the tools they need to get the job done..’ — Cliff Oxford, CEO at Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs

When you hire, you hire competent adults. Assuming you have done your research and procured references and you have offered a job to this individual, you should be fairly confident that they are an excellent addition to your company, and one worth investing in. Knowing that — let your employees work. And let them do it in a way that works for them. Top performers will want to work in a company that allows for a degree of autonomy. They don’t want to be micromanaged and they don’t need processes to guide their every decision and move. 

14. ‘Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.’ — Doris Kearns Goodwin, American biographer, historian, and political commentator

We love this quote because it’s all about psychological safety. Employees should feel that they can speak their minds and disagree without feeling like their job is on the line. They shouldn’t be so intimidated by management that they feel they can’t argue. How can progression and advancement ever happen without debate, difficult questions and confrontations? Encourage a company culture that not just allows, but rewards, employees to speak up when they feel they should.

15. ‘I’m a large believer in hiring the right people and giving them unbelievable amounts of power and autonomy.’ — Blake Mycoskie, Founder, TOMS Shoes

Similar to Cliff Oxford, Blake Mycoskie believes in the rewarding nature of autonomy. Time and again, giving employees more autonomy has been shown to work in terms of raising productivity, morale and retention. Autonomy can come in many forms, including letting employees decide when to start and finish work (within reason), what projects to prioritise and where to work from. Some companies, such as Dropbox, Songkick, and Eventbrite, go one step further and permit unlimited paid holiday. While this isn’t possible for many businesses, there are many other ways SMEs can encourage a culture of autonomy.

16. ‘True leadership stems from individuality that is honestly and sometimes imperfectly expressed… Leaders should strive for authenticity over perfection.’ — Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook

Authentic leaders are passionate about their work, they are committed to their organisations and they are future-focussed. They are empathetic, self-aware and are results-focused rather than being overly obsessed over processes. Studies have shown that authentic leadership supports employees, encourages continuous improvement and greater performance. When considering your company culture, think about types of leadership and how this will impact your business and employees.

17. ‘Employees make hundreds of decisions on their own everyday, and culture is our guide. Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn’t in the room, which is of course most of the time.’ — Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, Co-authors of Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

This quote about company culture is all the more optical in 2023, when you consider remote working. When working from home, employees don’t have their managers physically present to check in on them and effectively micromanage. A degree of trust is necessary. Managers need to believe in their employees and their abilities. But employees need to be armed with the company’s objectives, values and direction. These aspects of company culture will help to guide employee decisions in a meaningful way.

18. ‘There’s no magic formula for great company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated.’ — Richard Branson, Founder, Virgin Group

Too often, we overcomplicate things. Richard Branson has brought everything back to basics with these words. A company is simply a group of people, working towards a unified goal. People want to be treated with courtesy, respect and understanding. Going back to common human decency will go a long way to ensuring you build a solid company culture.

19. ‘I used to believe that culture was ‘soft,’ and had little bearing on our bottom line. What I believe today is that our culture has everything to do with our bottom line, now and into the future.’ — Vern Dosch, author, Wired Differently

Companies who disregard the idea of culture ultimately live to regret it. Without your culture, your company is rudderless. Your company culture will drive a feeling of belonging and purpose that will boost performance, productivity and engagement levels. These are the companies who survive and profit.

20. ‘One of our values is that you should be looking out for each other. Everyone should try to make the lives of everyone else who works here a little bit simpler.’ — Stewart Butterfield, Founder, Slack

Companies should aim to create a culture that encourages teamwork and supportive coworking relationships. Employees who feel they are constantly in competition are unlikely to help one another, and if this is the case, progress will be slow, if not stagnant. Companies benefit when employees work together to streamline processes and to make life easier for one another.

21. ‘It’s important for us to create a culture of innovation—one that both values and rewards risk.’ — Barbara Landes, CFO, PBS

If your employees don’t take risks, you won’t get the rewards. Dynamic, innovative companies understand this and encourage their employees to take risks. Inevitably, this means accepting a degree of failure. It’s better to try and to fail, and to learn from this failure, than to never attempt anything new. In this respect, ‘failure’ isn’t even a real concept for an innovative company. They’re simply lessons learned that could prompt great future innovation. 

22. ‘Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost.’ — Patty McCord, Chief Talent Officer, Netflix

This goes back to our point on autonomy and trust. Employees don’t always need every process formally laid out. More often than not, your employees will prove that they can simply be trusted to use their common sense and make the right choice, with the company’s culture and purpose in mind. If this isn’t the case, you might want to reassess the types of employees you are hiring; and the reasoning behind your hiring decisions.

23. ‘Our secret weapon for building the best culture is open and honest feedback.’ — Gina Lau, Team Operations, HelloSign

With every new generation, open, honest and continual feedback becomes all the more important. Your employees want to know how they are doing. They want to know where they can improve and how. They also want to know where they are shining, because positive feedback is just as important as constructive feedback. Managers should be encouraged to have regular one-on-ones with employees to build strong, honest relationships and to deliver timely, accurate feedback.

24. ‘You need the right people with you, not the best people.’ — Jack Ma

While we all want to hire great, talented, skilled employees, there is a lot to be said for company fit. Hiring the right people for your company — the ones who share your values, who are excited by your mission and who are driven to help you succeed — these are the people who will make your company great. These are also the people who are likely to stick with your organisation for the long-run.

25. ‘If you want employees to feel appreciated, you need to celebrate their achievements regularly and publicly’ — Logan Green, Co-Founder, Lyft

We’ve touched on recognition during one-on-one reviews. Public recognition and praise is also an important element to consider when creating, nurturing or adapting your company culture. Create an environment where great effort, as well as incredible achievements, are brought to light. In 2023, this can be done not only on Slack or in company meetings, but across social media. Not only will this help to boost your employee morale, it will also help to showcase your company culture to the public and, importantly, to prospective employees.

Here at People Insight, we help companies revitalise their employee experience and work towards the company culture they really want. With our employee surveys,  you can accurately measure employee engagement and then tweak your culture to improve engagement levels across your business.To find out more about how to successfully navigate culture change in the financial sector read download a free financial services report on transformational change.