Spot the early warning signs that your culture is struggling, even before the numbers reveal it.
If you feel thirsty, you’re already dehydrated.
Thirst is a lagging indicator. When your body signals thirst, you’ve already lost enough fluid to affect your focus, mood, and decisions. The feeling is not the issue—it’s the alarm that sounds after the problem has begun.
On the Future of Teamwork podcast, Shelley Smith—culture curator, founder of Premier Rapport, and author of Thirsty: Restoring Organizational Flow When Relationship Culture Runs Dry in the Workplace—spoke with LEAD3R CEO and host Dane Groeneveld. Shelley drew a clear parallel during their talk.
“I really believe that we, globally, are thirsty on many, many, many, many, many levels,”
she said.
Teams, leaders, and organizations can all run dry in ways that don’t show up on dashboards until it’s too late.
Culture is a lot like hydration. When your engagement survey finally shows a problem, the choices that led to it happened months earlier.
The measurement problem
Culture metrics have the same issue as thirst—they lag behind what’s really happening.
When attrition rises, people decided to leave months before. When eNPS drops, trust has already been lost. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace has shown for years that only about one in five employees worldwide are engaged at work. Most organizations have a workforce that is quietly either disengaged or already looking for something else.
Smith puts it simply: most new hires decide in their first week whether they’re committed.
“I really think within their first week they are deciding whether they’re all in or still looking or it’s good enough and I’m going to keep my head down.”
The exit interview might happen six months later, but the decision was made on day four.
This is the heart of the measurement problem. The signals that show if your culture will last are visible right away, but the metrics that confirm it come much too late.
The droplets: what to watch for
On the podcast, Smith describes the early signs of what she calls organizational dehydration in terms any leader can recognize. The pattern is not dramatic—it’s gradual.
“You used to participate in meetings and now you kind of hold your tongue,” she said. “You used to raise your hand and now you’re like, I’ll wait for somebody else. You used to say we, we, we, we, we. And now you say them and they — it’s almost like this disconnection.”
That shift from “we” to “they,” from raising your hand to staying quiet, is the real sign. It’s not the exit interview or the survey score—it’s the words people use in the hallway and how they act in meetings.
The droplets we see most often across teams:
- The language changes from “we” to “they.” Pay attention to how your team talks about the company in casual conversations. People who feel like they belong say “we.” Those who have checked out say “they.” This shift is subtle and usually happens in hallway chats or Slack messages, not in meetings.
- If the same three people do all the talking and capable team members go quiet, it’s not just about personality. It’s a sign that the system teaches people that speaking up isn’t worth it. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows that silence is rarely neutral—it’s something people learn.
- New hires often go quiet by their second week. The real sign isn’t the exit interview—it’s the third-week meeting, when someone who asked good questions on day three has stopped speaking up. “It’s very early in the courtship,” Smith noted. “It is a courtship on both sides.”
- Decisions don’t stick. The same issue gets discussed again two weeks later because no one believed the first decision. This isn’t a process problem—it’s an accountability problem that looks like a process issue.
- Recognition can start to feel mechanical. If your praise sounds like a template, people stop listening. When recognition doesn’t match how someone wants to be seen, it speeds up disconnection instead of stopping it.
- High performers start asking smaller questions. People who used to challenge strategy now ask about schedules. When your top talent stops engaging with big issues, it doesn’t mean they’re less ambitious—they’re just less convinced it’s worth the effort.
- Different teams repeat your values in different ways. If you ask five people at different levels what “accountability” means in practice and get five different answers, your values aren’t being lived—they’re being interpreted, and those interpretations are drifting apart.
Why this isn’t a talent problem
When these signals show up, it’s natural to blame the people. But that’s almost always the wrong approach.
Smith described a pattern she sees repeatedly in the companies she’s called into:
“We do hire really great individuals, and they were alive when we hired them… but we sucked the life out of them — because of what we did on the back end.”
Hiring isn’t the problem—retaining is. The interview promises one thing, but the first week of onboarding, the manager’s availability, the IT setup, and the introductions (or lack of them) deliver something else. That gap is where dehydration starts.
McKinsey’s research during The Great Attrition consistently found a gap between why leaders thought people were leaving (compensation, work-life balance) and why people actually left (not feeling valued, not feeling a sense of belonging, uncaring or uninspiring leaders).
The signs above aren’t individual failures—they’re results of the system.
The Roberts on your team
One of the sharper moments in the conversation came when Smith described walking into a new client engagement and being greeted at the security desk by a guard named Robert, who, before she’d even reached the elevator, told her exactly what was wrong with the company. People used to ride up together and talk, he said. Now they stare at their phones.
“Do you know the Roberts on your team?” Smith asked. “Who can tell you really what’s going on? And when’s the last time you met them where they are?”
Most executives measure culture from the boardroom, but people like Robert see it from the lobby. They notice who walks in with energy and who looks resigned. They hear what’s said in the elevator when leaders aren’t around and see which teams have stopped eating lunch together.
If you want early signals, find your Roberts—and make sure you really listen to them.
What to do instead
If the warning signs show up every day, your response should be daily too.
Smith is clear about this: organizations that keep their culture strong don’t rely on big initiatives. They focus on small, consistent actions.
“When you move too fast, nothing sticks,” she said. “It’s the flavor of the month. We’ve all been there.”
The alternative is what she calls hydration: the discipline of daily droplets.
“Hydration fully stays with you with the little droplets and the consistency at a time. The rituals that are not rituals, they’re normal. This is how we do what we do when we work together.”
In practice, that looks like three habits:
- Pay attention to the conversations, not just the results. Use small group check-ins, skip-level meetings, and simple questions like “what do you like, what do you wish, what do you wonder?” Gathering this information is easier than most leaders think—it just takes asking and truly listening.
- Think of onboarding as a 90-day design challenge, not just a checklist for the first week. Who a new hire meets in their first two weeks tells you more about their future than any orientation deck. As Smith put it:
“A lot of energy up front gives you massive rewards on the back end.”
- Make recognition about people, not just dates on the calendar. The annual awards program isn’t the issue—it’s relying on it too much. Teams that stay hydrated give recognition that is specific, personal, frequent, and connected to the behaviors they want to encourage.
The Bottom Line
Disengagement isn’t a people problem, and dehydration isn’t a hiring issue. These are signs from your system, and they’re telling you things your metrics can’t show yet.
The organizations that succeed in the coming years won’t be the ones with the highest engagement scores. They’ll be the ones who notice what’s happening before the scores change.
They’ll be the ones who learned to act before they felt thirsty.
Shelley Smith’s full conversation is available on the Future of Teamwork podcast.
This is the work we’re doing at the Healthy Team Summit. If you’re noticing these signals on your team and want to discuss the system behind them, you should attend.
Research and sources that informed this piece
- Smith, S. Thirsty: Restoring Organizational Flow When Relationship Culture Runs Dry in the Workplace.
- Gallup. State of the Global Workplace (annual report).
- Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth.
- De Smet, A., Dowling, B., Mugayar-Baldocchi, M., & Schaninger, B. (2022). “Great Attrition, Great Attraction: The Great Resignation Shows Many Workers Want to Leave Their Jobs.” McKinsey Quarterly.
- Gallup Q12 engagement research
- Sull, Sull, Zweig (2022). Toxic Culture is Driving the Great Resignation MIT Sloan.
