How to Build a Good Company Culture
Multifamily leaders share how companies can build stronger cultures through clearer expectations, consistent leadership and better feedback.
Company culture shows up most clearly in everyday moments: how leaders communicate, how teams handle conflict, how mistakes are addressed and how expectations apply across the company. In multifamily, where companies also depend on regional and corporate teams, as well as onsite staff to deliver a consistent resident experience, culture can quickly affect employee engagement and service quality.
The costs of a weak culture can be higher than many companies assume. A study by Gallup found that only 21 percent of U.S. employees strongly agreed that they felt connected to their organization’s culture. Those who strongly agreed are 4.3 times as likely to be engaged, 47 percent less likely to be watching for or actively seeking another job and 62 percent less likely to report frequent burnout. This gap highlights a broader challenge across industries: many companies define culture, but fewer put it into daily practice.
For David S. Lynch, chief people officer at RPM Living, culture becomes clearest when an organization is tested. “The strongest cultures are the ones that remain true to who they are (in difficult moments),” he said. “They do not abandon their humanity, standards or values when it becomes inconvenient.”
Across the multifamily sector, leaders point to a similar conclusion. In their view, culture is effective when it is clearly defined, consistently modeled and reinforced through established systems.
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Culture starts with visible behavior
Even when a company clearly defines its values, employees may not fully connect with them in their day-to-day work. Maria Pietroforte, president of Maria Pietroforte Consulting, sees culture as something that must be observable and tangible: “Good company culture is not what’s written on the wall—it’s what’s consistently demonstrated in behavior.”
This shows up in how teams communicate under pressure, how decisions are made and how expectations are met throughout the organization. That visibility also makes culture easier to measure. Pietroforte pointed to meeting dynamics, accountability standards and feedback as indicators of whether values have been translated into practice.
Lynch draws a similar distinction between defined culture and lived culture. “In practical, observable terms, culture is what is seen, felt, and experienced through daily human interaction,” he said. “It is the lived reality of the organization.”
He noted that employees experience culture the most through continuous interaction rather than written statements or handbooks. And in multifamily, where employee behavior directly shapes the resident experience, that distinction is especially important.
Kevin Ingham, chief human resources officer at Cortland, frames culture as something employees should be able to recognize in real time. At Cortland, that emphasis translates into a resident-focused operating model, where internal expectations around collaboration, transparency and ownership are reflected in resident experience.
For companies looking to strengthen that connection, multifamily experts point to a few practical steps. Leaders should explain the reasoning behind their decisions, so employees understand how choices align with company values. Managers should hold regular one-on-one meetings to reinforce expectations and address issues early. Teams should also use consistent feedback loops, such as surveys or check-ins, to identify gaps between stated culture and daily interactions.
Maintaining that alignment requires a balance between empathy and accountability. Lynch points to the need for setting clear standards. While recognizing employees as individuals with responsibilities outside of work, expectations cannot become flexible or inconsistent. “When people are treated with dignity and empathy, they also have a responsibility to show up as their best selves,” Lynch explained.
The cost of inconsistent leadership
Once a company defines its values, the next step is to ensure that those become credible through leadership behavior. In multifamily, where organizations work with local, regional and corporate teams, consistency matters because employees take cues from the standards leaders apply in everyday decisions. When expectations vary by manager, team or situation, culture becomes harder to trust and harder to repeat.
For Pietroforte, the values that matter most are clarity, accountability and respect. Those can be translated into written expectations, consistent communication, follow-through and professional conduct during difficult conversations.
“Culture is quietly damaged through inconsistency—when standards shift depending on the person or situation, when accountability is selective, or when difficult conversations are avoided,” she added. “Over time, this creates confusion and erodes trust.”
At Cortland, Ingham points to a similar set of warning signs: inconsistent communication can create confusion and mistrust, while a lack of acknowledgment can make employees feel undervalued. Over-managing, he added, can limit autonomy, innovation and personal accountability.
Gallup and Workhuman have found that strategic recognition and meaningful feedback remain underused, even though both can strengthen engagement and organizational performance when applied intentionally.
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Lynch pointed to another risk point. “What quietly damages culture is when leaders fail to embody what they expect from others,” he said. In a resident-facing business, that inconsistency and disconnect can weaken both employee morale and overall experience. “You cannot ask employees to personalize service if you give generic recognition, impersonal communication, and routine, one-size-fits-all feedback to your own people,” added Lynch.
Building culture beyond HR
Building culture from scratch requires more than handing employees a list of values during onboarding. Companies should try a more practical approach: define the behaviors, hire for them and reinforce them through workable systems.
Culture cannot sit only with HR. Lynch advises against treating culture as a finished product that employees receive after the strategy work is done. “Culture should not be designed by a small group behind closed doors and then handed to the rest of the organization as something they are simply expected to adopt,” he said.
In practice, culture starts before onboarding and continues through the employee experience. And if you were to build it today from scratch, here’s what it should look like:
- Define what “good” looks like. Pietroforte recommends moving beyond broad values and defining expectations in observable, behavioral terms. That gives employees a clearer standard for communication, accountability and performance.
- Involve employees in shaping the culture. Culture is more likely to take hold when employees help define the expectations they are being asked to follow. For multifamily companies, that means including voices from corporate, regional and onsite teams before turning values into daily standards.
- Build leadership alignment early. Different standards across managers can fracture culture before it has time to take hold. Leadership alignment is especially important in multifamily, where employees often work across different properties, markets and reporting lines.
- Hire and promote for cultural alignment. Ingham recommends evaluating collaboration and integrity in hiring and promotion decisions, not only technical ability. That means asking interview questions tied to culture-aligned behaviors and rewarding employees who elevate others.
- Use systems to keep culture active. Onboarding, one-on-one meetings, recognition, anonymous surveys and follow-up action help reinforce expectations after employees join.
In the end, culture shouldn’t be generic. Before turning values into systems, companies need to identify what sets them apart and what employees and residents should experience as a result. Pietroforte framed that work as an operating system rather than an initiative, with expectations built into daily management instead of periodic internal campaigns.
