The short version
Every shortcut in how you treat people accrues interest. This audit finds where you're paying it.
Technical debt is accepted vocabulary. Culture debt is the same idea: a shortcut taken under pressure that keeps charging interest long after the pressure passed.
Where it accumulates
- 1Unaddressed behavior — the high performer everyone works around.
- 2Broken promises — the reorg commitment, the review cycle that slipped twice.
- 3Distrusted processes — the performance system nobody believes, so real decisions happen elsewhere.
- 4Undocumented reasoning — decisions whose logic left with the person who made them.
How to run the audit
Get your leadership team in a room and list every item under those four headings, without solving anything for the first hour. Then score each on cost and difficulty, and pick the two with the highest cost-to-difficulty ratio.
The item everyone names within the first ten minutes is almost always the one you've been avoiding for the longest.
Pay it down visibly
Announce what you're fixing and why, including the part where it should have been fixed earlier. Culture debt repayment only counts when people can see it — silent fixes leave the belief intact.
Related resource
Culture Health Score
A short assessment that scores how your culture is actually operating — and emails you the full report.
Get the Culture Health Score