How HR Can Detect Cultural Drift Before It Becomes a Crisis

By the time employee turnover spikes, burnout becomes widespread, or engagement scores fall, the underlying cultural problem has often been developing for months. Leaders tend to focus on the visible symptoms, but those outcomes are frequently the final stage of a much deeper process.

Speaking at SHRM26, organizational strategist and culture architect Kelly Blackmon, founder of B.E. Consulting, said that HR leaders need to rethink how they diagnose workplace issues. Rather than reacting to the symptoms, organizations should learn to recognize the subtle relational signals that indicate culture is beginning to drift long before performance or retention problems emerge.

“When leaders see turnover or burnout in the organization, it is often thought that turnover or burnout is the problem, when usually it’s something else going on,” Blackmon said.

That shift in perspective forms the basis of what Blackmon refers to as the Relational Drift Cycle, a framework designed to help organizations identify the hidden dynamics shaping workplace culture before they compound into costly organizational challenges.

Looking Beneath the Surface

HR professionals are frequently tasked with solving problems such as communication breakdowns, resistance to change, declining engagement, or increasing turnover. But Blackmon challenged attendees to question whether those issues are actually the root cause.

“What if those aren’t the problems?” he said. “What if something is happening underneath? People are experiencing something, but it might not be what we think.”

The reason, he explained, is that employees do not experience organizations directly.

“People experience signals,” Blackmon said. “They interpret what a signal means and that is how they experience the organization. That interpretation itself makes its own meaning. That meaning influences behaviors. And the behavior is the thing we see — burnout, quiet quitting, turnover. Those are the hidden mechanics of how culture shift works.”

For HR leaders, that means the visible workplace behaviors they measure may actually be lagging indicators of much earlier relational changes.

Resource: Organizational Design and Change Management

Why Employees Hear Different Messages

One of the framework’s central ideas is that employees assign different meanings to the same organizational message.

“Shared conditions do not equate to shared meaning,” Blackmon said.

Leadership often assumes everyone interprets executive communications identically. In reality, identical messages frequently produce vastly different conclusions.

“When the leader says ‘productivity must be increased,’ one person hears ‘work smarter,’ someone else hears ‘we’re understaffed,’ and another person hears ‘layoffs are coming,’ ” he explained.

Those differing interpretations gradually pull teams in different directions.

Blackmon compared the phenomenon to an airplane drifting only a few degrees off course.

“Imagine when an air travel pattern is off by 10 or 15 degrees,” he said. “You will end up in a very different place. A little drift may be OK, but if not corrected, that drift will compound over time.”

The same principle applies to organizational diagnosis. “If you assume one problem and it’s something else, you will be significantly off when diagnosing problems,” he said. “If you react to bad information you will be off course.”

The Relational Drift Cycle

According to Blackmon, organizations often follow a predictable pattern when cultural problems emerge. Leadership notices declining performance and asks HR to intervene. Under pressure to respond quickly, organizations launch training initiatives, introduce new programs, or change processes.

Yet if leaders have misidentified the underlying issue, those interventions may actually push the organization further away from the real problem.

“This is the relational drift cycle,” Blackmon said. “It’s like digging in the wrong place,” he said. “Our decisions move further and further from the center of truth, and eventually get worse. Sometimes we make the problem worse.”

Today’s workplace makes that risk even greater. “In the past, when a big change happened, there was time to stabilize and get back to normal,” he said. “That is not happening now. AI implementation, workforce reorganizations, and outside pressures are all happening at the same time, which means that change is outpacing human stabilization.”

Toolkit: Building a Strong Organizational Culture

Five Signals HR Should Watch

Rather than waiting for the outcomes, Blackmon encouraged HR leaders to monitor five earlier signals that indicate culture may already be drifting.

The first is ambiguous expectations, which he described as one of the most common and costly organizational problems. Employees frequently express uncertainty by saying they believed different priorities were in place or were unaware expectations had changed.

Many organizations attempt to solve the issue simply by communicating more often. Blackmon argued that additional meetings rarely address the underlying problem.

Instead, he recommended asking managers across different functions to independently define what success looks like for the same objective. Significant variation in their answers reveals inconsistent expectations that need to be addressed before they cascade throughout the organization.

The second signal involves narrative gaps. “When meaning starts to become unstable, humans start filling in the gaps,” Blackmon said. “That’s how humans work. Our brains are puzzle solvers.”

Without sufficient context, employees naturally create their own explanations for organizational decisions. A modest workforce reduction, for example, can quickly become interpreted as evidence that broader layoffs are imminent.

HR leaders can uncover narrative gaps by comparing leadership’s intended message with how employees actually interpret it. Differences between the two indicate where trust and clarity are beginning to erode.

The third indicator is behavioral inconsistency, or the disconnect between organizational messaging and actual organizational behavior.

“When systems and messages start to diverge, people will choose what to trust,” Blackmon said.

Employees pay closer attention to what organizations reward than to what leaders say. Companies that promote collaboration while rewarding individual stars, or encourage risk-taking while punishing failed experiments, unintentionally teach employees which values truly matter.

To diagnose this disconnect, Blackmon suggested asking employees two simple questions: “What do you believe gets rewarded?” and “What do you believe gets punished?” Their answers often provide a more accurate picture of organizational culture than official value statements.

The fourth signal involves emotional undercurrents. “When trust becomes unstable, that’s when leaders begin to notice that something is going on,” he said.

These emotional shifts may persist for six to eighteen months before they affect operational performance. Employees become increasingly exhausted, cynical, reluctant to speak openly, or fearful about the future.

Because employees rarely volunteer these concerns unless problems become severe, Blackmon encouraged HR leaders to ask managers to consistently check in with their employees.

Finally, organizations should monitor decision pressure. As uncertainty grows and change accelerates, leaders face increasing pressure to respond quickly, often before they fully understand the problem. That urgency can reinforce the cycle of treating symptoms rather than addressing root causes.