The OIL Model
A Culture Transformation Framework for Sustainable Workplace Change
Culture is the way your workforce understands the world around them, and how they behave as a result. People act in the ways they believe will be ignored, tolerated or rewarded by the group, making culture either an expensive organizational risk or an extraordinary strategic asset. Civility Partners’ OIL Model is a workplace culture framework that helps organizations look beyond symptoms to identify the Organizational systems, Individual behaviors, and Leadership factors contributing to workplace culture problems, so that lasting culture change can occur.
Workplace Culture Framework
What Is the OIL Model of Workplace Culture?
The OIL Model provides clarity to the concept of culture and offers guidance on how to strategically change it. It defines culture as existing in three, equally important, interconnected lenses:
O — Organizational
The systems, structures, processes, policies, technology, norms, and practices that shape how people interact and how work gets done.
I — Individual
The behaviors, communication styles, choices, skills, abilities, experiences, cultures, worldviews and interpersonal skills employees bring into the workplace.
L — Leadership
The behaviors leaders model, tolerate, reward, reinforce, and address. It also includes where they choose to put resources, how transparent they are with the workforce, and their own group dynamics.
O — Organizational
Organizational Factors That Shape Workplace Culture
Many companies (and culture consultants) overlook the fact that the systems, policies, processes, communication, technology, documents and more may be unintentionally damaging workplace culture and therefore creating risk.
Examining how the organization behaves is important because it reveals how the business either supports or undermines the culture you desire, and allows you to identify what to change and how.
For example, if you reward results regardless of how those results are achieved, employees quickly learn that disrespectful behavior is ignored, tolerated and even rewarded. It means the system of accountability is broken and creates risk for lawsuits and a bad reputation. The individual isn’t a villain, they’re behaving in the ways the organization accidentally encouraged them to.
Organizational factors that influence culture may include:
- Policies and procedures
- Performance management
- Hiring and onboarding
- Rewards and recognition
- Reporting systems
- Communication practices
- Workload and resources
- Organizational structure
- Accountability systems
- Training
- Promotion practices
- Organizational values
- Response to employee complaints or surveys
- So much more
I — Individual
Individual Behavior and Workplace Culture
Organizations are systems, but they’re made up of people. And every employee contributes to workplace culture through their daily behavior.
How people communicate, respond to conflict, give feedback, handle pressure, collaborate, set boundaries, and react when they witness inappropriate behavior all influence the employee experience and organization’s culture.
Every employee, manager and leader has a different perspective of how to engage with others if it’s not clearly defined for them. They may all understand that they should be respectful, for example, but respect means different things to different people.
Managers will also vary in how they hold teams accountable, and employees will behave according to the manager’s point of view if it’s even communicated, or according to their own personal beliefs.
That means every employee, manager and leader brings behaviors that either strengthen or strain the workplace. Identifying and adjusting the organizational behaviors that drive or deter the “right” individual behaviors, upskilling the workforce to uplift the culture, and holding people accountable through systems is an important combination for sustainable culture change.
Individual behavior is influenced by:
- Consistent standards communicated by the organization
- Resources provided to meet those standards
- Interpersonal communication
- Conflict mediation and resolution skills
- Feelings of psychological safety
- Confidence
- Culture
- Manager ability to lead people
- Collaboration skills
- Group dynamics
- Experiences
- Education
- Worldview and perceptions
- Civility
- Self awareness
- Emotional intelligence
- Upstander skills
- Assertiveness
- So much more
L — Leadership
Leadership Behavior and Workplace Culture
Culture is certainly influenced by the leadership team, and change succeeds or stalls based on leadership’s relationships with each other and the workforce, decisions and resource allocation, priorities, communication, transparency, and daily behavior.
Leadership teams must define the current culture and the one they wish to achieve. Only then can they align their expectations, build accountability into organizational behavior, earn trust from their workforce, make decisions that support the defined culture, and agree on the right resources to upskill the workforce.
Leadership behavior influences culture through:
- Modeling the right behavior
- Transparency in messaging to the workforce
- Communication and relationship building
- Reinforcing organizational values
- Resource allocation
- Leadership skills and abilities
- Vulnerability
- Ability to encourage and enforce desired behavior
- Understanding of the importance of culture as a risk management strategy
- Building trust with employees
- Tolerating or rewarding behavior and performance
- Assertiveness
- Negotiation skills
- So much more
The more these three areas are aligned the more customer and workforce loyalty, revenue, and profitability.
Using the OIL Model to Diagnose Workplace Culture Problems
When we first partner with an organization, we often find that workplace culture is misaligned across organizational, individual and leadership team behaviors.
A leadership team wanted to move from poor engagement and distrust in the workforce to being a high performing team, for example. When asked what high performance meant, they did not have a clear answer.
Organizational Behavior
The organization’s behavior was inhibiting their ability to be a high performing team in the following ways:
- High performance was not clearly defined.
- Performance management systems were not set up to acknowledge and reward high performance.
- There was high tolerance for behaviors that discourage high performance by harming relationships and productivity, such as bullying and hazing.
- Little manager training about high performance or leadership skills sitting in a clunky corporate learning management system (LMS) that inadvertently discouraged learning.
Individual Behavior
As a result, the behavior of individuals and managers included:
- Various and inconsistent ideas of what high performance meant.
- Competition for acknowledgment of high performance due to perceptions that it could lead to a promotion.
- Inconsistent management of high and low performance as each manager had their own ideas of acceptable behavior, given that it had not been defined – leading to perceptions of favoritism.
- Fingerpointing and blaming each other for problems, and claims that some work much harder than others.
- Bullying and hazing.
Leadership Behavior
Leadership’s role in this dysfunctional culture included:
- Lack of communication that defined high performance, why it was important, and how it can impact one’s career.
- The decision to put minimal budget towards training managers to be high performers, or lead a high performing team.
- Public corporate communication that unions are a risk to the organization, resulting in a chip on the shoulder of union members who made up roughly 90% of the workforce.
In order for the organization to achieve a culture of high performance, all three areas need to be examined and transformed into alignment using a culture transformation framework.
From Workplace Culture Problems to Culture Strategy
Culture transformation looks different in every organization. Based on what is uncovered through assessments, listening sessions, and stakeholder interviews, we partner with you to design a customized mix of initiatives that address organizational systems, individual behavior, and leadership accountability.
Below are examples of the types of initiatives we implement with clients to turn culture goals into sustainable, measurable change.
Organizational Systems
- Define or refresh mission, vision, and values—and translate them into measurable workplace behavioral competencies.
- Clarify roles, responsibilities, and growth expectations through stronger job descriptions and postings.
- Develop career pathways, succession plans, and on-the-job learning opportunities.
- Strengthen onboarding with structured processes, clearer expectations, and buddy programs.
- Modernize performance management to support frequent feedback, development, and accountability.
Individual Behavior
- Deliver workforce training based on identified needs, including respectful communication, intercultural communication, speaking up, and implicit bias.
- Equip managers to build healthy teams, address toxic behavior, resolve conflict, and exchange meaningful feedback.
- Coach managers and leadership teams to communicate expectations and lead employees through culture change.
- Facilitate conflict resolution, restorative conversations, and team dialogues.
- Coach high-conflict or toxic leaders toward measurable behavior change.
Leadership Team Behavior
- Coach executives—individually or as a team—to model expectations, operationalize culture, and hold leaders at every level accountable.
- Help senior leaders communicate culture expectations clearly and consistently.
- Establish skip-level meetings and other feedback channels to improve transparency, understand workforce needs, and rebuild trust.
- Create shared leadership ownership so culture change becomes embedded throughout the organization.
How To Measure the Business Impact of Culture
Culture is more than just a nice to have, it is an imperative for business success. Impacts to the business can be measured in a variety of ways, including production, management load, decision cycles, retention, performance and organizational agility. Here are two examples:
Measuring the Impact of Culture Through Productivity
Healthy cultures that are aligned in the organizational, individual and leadership team behavior produce better business performance because they have clarity, communication, trust, and psychological safety. Time is spent executing instead of navigating confusion.
You can measure, for example:
- Output per employee (requests resolved, units completed)
- Quotas or deadlines (timelines met, goals met or exceeded)
- Cycle time (time from task start to completion)
You can uncover, for example:
The initiative and training focused on manager feedback decreased rework by 15%.
Communication and upskilling around a “high performing team” increased efficiency by 9% and thus productivity by 16%, which can be correlated to the 10% increase in revenue.
Measuring the Impact of Culture Through Management Load
Healthy cultures that are aligned in the organizational, individual and leadership team behavior reduce unnecessary burden on leaders. When communication is clear and accountability is consistent, managers spend less time resolving issues and more time coaching, developing people, and driving results.
You can measure, for example:
- Time in meetings (% of workweek spent in meetings)
- Time spent addressing unproductive issues (% of day spent on conflict resolution or discussion about an issue, time spent emailing or creating reports)
- Number of people involved in decisions (number of people who must approve, number of times issue appears on agendas)
- Self-perceptions and team-perceptions (communication or timeliness of feedback scores)
You can uncover, for example:
After implementing clearer communication and accountability practices, managers gained back 3.5 hours per week.
Teams saw a 15% increase in quality work within two quarters.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do we know if our culture is a business risk?
Common signs include inconsistent management practices, low trust, poor engagement, unwanted turnover, recurring conflict, communication breakdowns, perceptions of favoritism, and tolerance for toxic behavior. Misalignment in organizational, individual and leadership behavior may also appear when an organization promotes certain values but its policies, leadership decisions, or reward systems encourage something different.
Where does a culture transformation begin?
We begin by defining the culture the organization needs to achieve its business goals and assessing the current culture against that vision. Depending on the organization, discovery may include a customized workforce survey, leadership interviews, listening sessions, focus groups, document and process reviews, and analysis of available workforce data. This establishes a baseline, uncovers root causes, and prevents the organization from investing in solutions that address symptoms rather than the real problem.
How is culture transformation different from employee engagement?
Engagement measures how employees feel about their work and workplace. Culture examines the environment creating those feelings—including leadership behavior, management practices, communication, policies, systems, accountability, and working relationships. Engagement may be one important outcome of culture change, but increasing engagement requires addressing the conditions influencing it.
Why isn’t training alone enough to change culture?
Training can build awareness and skills, but employees cannot sustain new behaviors if organizational systems and leadership practices continue rewarding the old ones. For example, respectful communication training will have limited impact if managers tolerate bullying or high performers are rewarded despite toxic behavior. We connect training to expectations, accountability, leadership behavior, and organizational systems so employees can apply what they learn.
Do you work with organizations experiencing bullying or toxic behavior?
Yes. Civility Partners specializes in helping organizations address workplace bullying, incivility, abrasive leadership, and other high-conflict behaviors. Depending on the circumstances, our work may include culture assessment, executive coaching, manager development, facilitated dialogue, conflict resolution, policy and process changes, and organization-wide culture transformation.
What if employees or leaders resist culture change?
Resistance often reflects uncertainty, a lack of trust, competing priorities, or previous change efforts that produced little action. We identify the source of resistance and address it through clear communication, leadership alignment, meaningful employee involvement, manager support, and visible accountability. The goal is not to force enthusiasm, but to create clarity, credibility, and sustained participation.
How long does culture transformation take?
The timeline depends on the organization’s size, complexity, current culture, and desired outcomes. Targeted issues may improve within several months, while broader transformation commonly requires a phased, long-term effort. We establish early priorities and measurable milestones so the organization can demonstrate progress while building toward sustainable change.
How do you measure culture change and business impact?
We establish a baseline at the beginning of the engagement and identify measures connected to the organization’s goals. Rather than relying on training attendance or employee satisfaction alone, we examine both behavioral change and business outcomes.
Measures may include:
- Engagement, trust, psychological safety, and perceptions of leadership
- Turnover, retention, absenteeism, and internal mobility
- Employee relations complaints, grievances, and recurring conflict
- Time managers and HR spend resolving workplace problems
- Manager escalations and time to resolve conflict
- Leadership and manager behavior before and after development
- Onboarding effectiveness and time to productivity
- Collaboration, communication, and performance across teams
- Customer experience, productivity, safety, or quality indicators
- Progress on organization-specific culture commitments
Whenever possible, we compare baseline, midpoint, and follow-up data to determine what changed, where progress is occurring, and where additional intervention is needed.
How do you connect culture change to revenue and profitability?
Culture affects the business through retention, productivity, management time, absenteeism, collaboration, customer experience, risk, and the organization’s ability to execute its strategy. We identify which of these outcomes matter most to the client, establish relevant baseline data, and track progress throughout the engagement. This enables leaders to understand culture as a business performance issue—not simply an employee experience initiative.
Can Civility Partners support implementation, or do you only make recommendations?
We do both. Our role can extend from discovery and strategy through implementation, measurement, and reinforcement. We may facilitate leadership alignment, redesign organizational processes, coach leaders, develop managers, deliver workforce training, resolve conflict, support internal communication, and help leaders monitor progress until the new expectations become part of everyday operations which is the hallmark of a sustainable culture transformation framework.