Practical Ways Managers Influence Culture

How much of a company's culture actually lives with its managers? In this episode of CultureClubX, powered by CultureMonkey, host Diana Blass explores that question with Tracy Dodd, Chief People Officer at VNS Health, one of the largest home-based and community-based care organizations in the country. Its nurses, speech pathologists, psychologists and social workers serve hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers every day, in their homes and in the community.

Tracy brings 30 years of experience leading data-driven people and culture strategies across multiple industries. Before VNS Health she served as Head of Global Talent at Tiffany & Company, Senior Vice President of Global Talent Management at MasterCard, and VP of Talent Development at CA Technologies, and she spent 14 years at JPMorgan Chase across HR, organizational development, and talent management.

The conversation moves from psychological safety and the limits of candor to middle manager burnout, survey transparency, microcultures, and where technology genuinely helps. The thread running through all of it is simple: managers shape culture every single day, and organizations have to deliberately equip them to do it well.

Why psychological safety is the bedrock of trust

Asked what managers can do to make employees feel more valued, Tracy goes straight to psychological safety. It is a hot topic for a reason, she says. People need an environment where they feel really comfortable sharing their thoughts, expressing their opinions, and offering feedback, including feedback to their peers and their managers, without fearing penalties or retaliation.

For Tracy, trust has to sit at the core and the heart of culture. Without it, in her words, everything else just erodes. The manager's first job is to build the conditions in which honesty feels safe rather than risky, and that starts with how they respond the very first time someone speaks up.

Where does psychological safety end and reckless communication begin

Safety does not mean anything goes. Tracy points to a LinkedIn post she reshared that draws the line between a psychologically safe environment and reckless communication, where people vent, complain, and skip the filter because they assume openness excuses everything. No, it's not okay, she says plainly.

Her reference here is the book Crucial Conversations and its idea of creating a shared pool of meaning. You can bring your thoughts, ideas, feedback, and opinions to work, but you have to express yourself in a productive, healthy way. Difficult conversations still require respect and civility, and yelling, screaming, or abusive behavior is never what psychological safety means.

What signs tell a manager an employee is struggling

The cues are usually behavioral. Employees who are stressed out, burned out, having emotional outbursts, or struggling to self-regulate their emotions at work are showing what Tracy calls a pretty clear sign that a manager needs to dig in and find out what is going on. Burnout, she notes, has become a bit of another pandemic as a result of the pandemic.

She also flags a subtler pattern from the virtual work era. The screen between people has dehumanized and desensitized interactions, making conversations less diplomatic than they would be face-to-face across a table. It has created an excuse, a barrier to human-to-human connection, that lets people be a little more disrespectful than they would ever be in person.

Context matters at VNS Health, where corporate staff work hybrid but the majority of employees are field facing, out in communities and patients' homes with no work from home flexibility. Managers there have to read emotional cues across two very different working realities at once, which makes deliberate employee sentiment tracking all the more important.

How VNS Health listens to a workforce that is mostly in the field

Tracy describes a stack of listening channels rather than a single survey. Team time breakfasts were launched by CEO Dan Savitt, whom she calls the most present and visible CEO of her 30-year career, and employees bring him everything from strategic suggestions to tactical field issues. Leaders across the organization also host employee roundtables at times that suit field schedules.

Then there is her own podcast, Courageous Conversations, which invites field employees to raise the provocative questions that are on people's minds but rarely get asked out loud. Layered on top are the annual employee survey and mobile enabled pulse surveys that are easy to complete from the field, so listening reaches the people who never sit at a desk.

Middle managers are carrying the heaviest burnout load

Tracy agrees emphatically that managers are overburdened. Beyond the traditional work of managing teams and assignments, they now carry employee emotional health, pandemic related change, retention challenges, inspiring great work, and building workplace culture. The result is that middle managers show significantly higher burnout and stress than other populations, even field employees.

VNS Health is attacking the problem structurally: reviewing org design and span of control, using process improvement to pull unnecessary lower value work off managers' plates, and delegating decisions to field employees who are closest to patients and probably have the best solutions. The organization is also building collaboration communities where managers coach each other.

Bring managers together, Tracy says, and you can gather hundreds of years of experience in one cohort. Peer coaching gives managers solutions to everyday problems, and just as importantly it gives them a sense of community and belonging, so they do not feel like they are alone.

How do you convince employees that surveys are safe and worth their time

Asked whether workplace monitoring software has eroded trust, Tracy reframes the issue as an old problem, not a new tech problem: employees not believing surveys are truly confidential. She has led survey work for more than 20 years and hears the same question in every organization, often phrased as, how do you know the completion rate if you don't know what I said?

Her answer is transparency. When VNS Health moved to a new survey vendor with a manager action planning dashboard, the team explained exactly how the process works, how completion rates are known by department, and how a manager with 15 employees gets a score for a question. Explaining the mechanics matters because human nature fills information gaps with worst-case scenarios.

Notably, VNS Health offered no incentives for participation. What moved people was a new approach to action planning that was not top-down: employees worked with their managers to design the solutions themselves, instead of the executive team deciding at the leadership table. People respond when they can see somebody is actually going to do something with their input.

Survey fatigue is a myth, action fatigue is real

Tracy calls survey fatigue a myth, citing research from Perceptyx. What exhausts employees is being asked the same questions over and over while nothing visibly changes. That distinction flips the usual objection to frequent listening on its head: the cure for fatigue is not fewer surveys, it is more meaningful follow-through on what employees say.

Done well, a pulse survey cadence closes that loop: ask employees specifically about their experience, share the results back, involve them in action planning, then check in again to ask, did we get it right, are we making progress. Each cycle proves that speaking up leads somewhere, which is exactly what builds trust.

Microcultures are not a threat to company culture

Organizations tend to describe their culture as one thing, but Tracy argues that a company operating across many teams, functions, or countries cannot have just one culture. Microcultures will absolutely exist within different teams, and there is nothing wrong with that. Ideally they all align with the overall culture the organization aspires to have, while flexing to local needs.

At VNS Health, alignment comes from data and dialogue. Employee resource groups have grown from two to seven, with three more planned, and survey results are analyzed by tenure, gender, ethnicity, department, function, and level. Where the numbers show different groups experiencing the company differently, focus groups and ERGs give those differences a voice.

The glue is a set of shared values, integrity, empathy, and agility, plus a culture of continuous learning that pushes employees to own their careers. On hiring, Tracy favors the expression hiring for culture add, not culture fit, because a fast-changing talent landscape demands diversity of thought rather than more of the same.

What this episode says about employee listening

Tracy is enthusiastic but disciplined about technology: never implement it for technology's sake, and always know whether you are trying to create community, collaboration, or shared knowledge. At VNS Health that means LinkedIn talent insights for clinical recruiting and a pilot of Caribou, a social recognition tool designed specifically for home care workers, because recognition rose to the top of what employees at all levels are craving.

Strip the episode down and one discipline underpins everything: listen, act, and show your work. Ask for feedback, follow through or explain why not, be transparent about how the data works, and close every loop. That is the practice CultureMonkey exists to support, giving managers the sentiment insights and follow-through tools to turn listening into the culture their teams actually experience.