Why values are the missing layer in every conversation about culture

Written by Amy Billings from &Evolve

Walk into most Birmingham workplaces right now and you will find a familiar story: people who care, working inside conditions that quietly wear that care down.

The numbers back it up. Gallup's 2026 data puts UK workers who felt "a lot" of stress the previous day at 46 per cent, above the European and global average. Only 23 per cent of UK workers say they are thriving at work. A quarter say their job is actively damaging their mental health. And workplace conflict has just hit its highest level ever recorded in a survey of British workers, at 44 per cent, costing the UK economy an estimated £28.5bn a year.

None of that is a people problem. It is a design problem. &Evolve's ten year Culture Diagnostic, drawn from over 800 employees across six sectors and close to 8,800 individual comments, found the same pattern again and again: people rate what is close to them highly, their team, their role, their own contribution, and rate what is systemic poorly, cross department working, bureaucracy, whether leaders live the values they talk about. Care arrives on day one. What happens to it after that is down to leadership and structure, not the individual.

So, the question worth sitting with is not "how do we make people happier". It is "what is actually driving whether people click, or clash, in the first place".

The layer underneath skills and personality

Most businesses hire for experience. Some test for personality. Almost none measure the thing that turns out to matter most: values.

Professor Shalom Schwartz spent decades mapping human values across more than 80 countries and found they sit in a consistent pattern everywhere he looked. They form a circle. Neighbouring values, like independence and creativity, tend to reinforce each other. Opposite values, like achievement and benevolence, sit in genuine tension, because it is not possible to optimise for winning and for caring at the same moment, on the same decision.

10 values, (dropped to eight values for the workplace, with four underlying orientations), and a structure that has replicated across culture after culture since the 1990s. It is not a personality model. It is a map of what people believe is fundamentally important, and it turns out to predict behaviour far more reliably than is usually assumed.

Roccas and colleagues found values explain around 43 per cent of the variance in how people actually behave, compared with roughly 8 per cent for personality traits. Most recruitment effort still goes toward the smaller number.

Why this shows up as trust, or its absence

Difference itself is not the problem. Diverse teams outperform homogenous ones on almost every measure that matters. The problem is difference nobody has named.

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 found 76 per cent of people in the UK are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone whose values differ from their own. That is not something people announce in a team meeting. It shows up as the slight hesitation before backing a colleague's idea, the meeting where two people talk past each other despite agreeing on the goal, the new hire who fits the job description perfectly and still never quite lands with the team.

&Evolve's diagnostic found something similar hiding in plain sight. Asked whether their organisation supports their development, 96 per cent of senior leaders said yes. Only 43 per cent of their own colleagues agreed. That is not dishonesty on anyone's part. It is what happens when people are working from different pictures of the same organisation, and nobody has stopped to check where the pictures diverge.

What this means for how organisations are led

There is hope. Gallup's research suggests up to 70 per cent of the difference in team engagement comes down to one relationship: the person's manager. And happier workers are not just more pleasant to be around, they are measurably more productive, with one Saïd Business School study tracking a 13 per cent uplift tied to wellbeing week on week. A portfolio of the 100 best companies for employee wellbeing beat the S&P 500 (the benchmark index of America's 500 largest listed companies)by a fifth between 2021 and 2023.

None of this requires leaders to manufacture care that is not there. &Evolve's research is clear that the care already exists, in almost every organisation, in almost every sector. What it requires is leaders willing to see clearly what is actually driving connection and friction inside their teams, rather than assuming it is about skill, effort or personality when it is very often about values quietly working for or against each other.

That starts with a simple willingness to ask the question and actually look at the answer: how aligned are the values across an organisation, and where are the tensions that have never been named?

A question to sit with

If a business asked its own people what they genuinely value, not what the wall in reception says, how far would their answers sit from each other, and from leadership's? And what would change the moment that gap became visible?

This is not a call to fix people. It is an invitation to see them more clearly, using a map that has held steady across 80 countries and several decades, because the layer underneath every culture conversation Birmingham businesses are having right now is the same one: human values, and whether they are understood well enough to work with.