Building the Right Culture on a Major Project

101: culture is what the project makes normal

People learn a project's culture through ordinary encounters: the shift handover, a late drawing, an uncomfortable forecast, a request for help. They notice who gets heard, whose commitments matter and what happens when the plan stops working. A statement on the wall becomes useful when those encounters demonstrate it.

On a major project, that culture must cross employers, contracts, disciplines, languages and phases. A productive working relationship needs shared outcomes and respect for the different responsibilities people carry. Start with the practical question: what must someone be able to rely on when they work with this team?

Grant Stead's turnaround example brings that question down to the shift: people need prepared work, clear tasks and a dependable handover. His culture-is-cadence idea connects the atmosphere on site with the planning that makes work possible.

Build one project team across the company boundaries

The project needs an identity people can act on. Name the asset or service you are delivering, who will use it and what successful delivery requires from the whole team. Translate that purpose into joint priorities for the next phase, including the interfaces where one organisation's output becomes another's constraint.

AJ's joint-venture experience makes shared identity tangible. Build it through joint planning, mixed working groups, shared site introductions and recognition of contributions across company lines. Keep the role and safety identifiers people need while giving everyone a clear sense of the project they belong to.

Test the identity against a difficult choice. If engineering meets its date by issuing incomplete information, has the project succeeded? If one partner protects its position by withholding a problem, who carries the consequence? Agree how the team will resolve those conflicts, including the commercial route when a decision affects cost or contractual responsibility.

Turn values into working agreements

Before announcing new rules, learn the existing ones. Ask a supervisor, a designer, a contractor manager and a new starter to describe a recent handover or difficult decision. Find the practices that help and the obstacles people work around. Include the shifts, locations and organisations that are easy to miss from the project office.

Then agree a small set of observable behaviours. For each, specify the situation, the expected action and who follows through. Work through examples together so that terms such as respect, transparency and ownership mean something in the work.

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Make these agreements part of onboarding and routine reviews. Ask leaders to name where their own behaviour has fallen short. Update the agreements when the work exposes an ambiguity, rather than quietly teaching people to ignore them.

Give the team a dependable working rhythm

A meeting calendar only helps when it moves work and decisions. Connect each recurring conversation to an input, an output and someone responsible for the handover. Coordinate the rhythm with the site's safety, quality and permit processes, and make sure contractors and support functions can meet it.

• Before the shift or work period: establish the ready work, constraints, priorities and decisions needed.
• At the handover: explain what changed, what remains incomplete and what the receiving team must know.
• At the coordination review: resolve interfaces and near-term constraints with the people who can act.
• At the learning review: choose an experience that should change the next cycle of work and assign the change.
• At the leadership review: address commitments, capacity and recurring obstacles that the delivery team cannot resolve alone.

Choose frequencies that fit the work. A turnaround may require a different rhythm from design development or a geographically distributed programme. Remove duplicate meetings and protect time for preparation and execution. If a routine produces no useful decision or handover, change its purpose, participants or timing.

Make it possible to bring bad news early

The first response to bad news becomes a lesson for everyone watching. Establish the immediate facts and consequences, thank the person for raising the concern, and decide what needs protecting or investigating now. Give the team a route to escalate before it has a polished explanation or a complete solution.

AJ's ownership of an estimating mistake shows the other half of the agreement: speak honestly about the part of the work you were responsible for. Leaders should do the same. Ask what happened, what conditions contributed, what each person owned and what will change. Follow up with the person who raised the problem so the reporting effort leads somewhere.

Keep learning and accountability together. Examine the system around an error while addressing individual responsibilities through a fair process. Distinguish a mistake or capability gap from deliberate concealment or misconduct. A constructive culture makes the facts easier to establish; it does not make responsibilities disappear.

Make room for challenge before committing

People need to be able to ask for help, acknowledge uncertainty and question a proposal. Make those acts useful in the decision process. A quiet room can mean agreement, but it can also mean the decision appeared settled before everyone had a chance to contribute.

Send the question and relevant evidence in advance. Collect concerns individually where hierarchy, language or company relationships make open discussion difficult. Ask quieter specialists and the people receiving the work what they see. Have the most senior person listen before declaring a preferred answer.

Close with a decision, the reasons for it and any unresolved assumptions. Record what evidence would trigger reconsideration. This gives disagreement a practical route into the work without leaving every decision permanently open.

Give people authority and the support to use it

A culture of ownership requires usable decision rights. Walk a real design change, supplier delay or field conflict through the team. Establish who develops the recommendation, who must contribute, who decides within which limits and when the issue moves to another level. Check that the owner and delivery partners recognise the same arrangement.

Pair responsibility with competence, time, information and access to help. When someone cannot deliver, investigate the constraint before describing it as a lack of commitment. Leaders can coach, remove obstacles and review outcomes without becoming the approval point for every routine choice.

Apply the same discipline to promises made in meetings. Name one accountable owner and a realistic date. If the promise depends on another team, make that dependency explicit. Renegotiating a commitment early gives the receiving team options; silently missing it teaches everyone to build their own private contingencies.

Check what the project actually rewards

Look at the behaviour that wins praise, protects a bonus or avoids an uncomfortable conversation. A team may say it values early warning while celebrating reports that stay green. It may say it values collaboration while rewarding a package for passing incomplete work to the next discipline.

Review incentives and performance measures with the people who understand the contracts and the delivery consequences. Combine local commitments with evidence of the handover or shared outcome. Recognise people who expose an assumption, resolve an interface or help another team prevent rework. Be specific about the contribution so recognition is more than a personality contest.

Make the information behind those conversations consistent. Agree reporting dates, definitions, owners and the treatment of unresolved data. People should be able to challenge a number without creating a second unofficial version of the project. Follow the Data and Reporting guides for the structures that support this shared view.

Make learning part of the next piece of work

Use a recent event while the detail is still available. Describe what was expected, what happened and why the difference matters. Examine successful work as well as failures: the team that avoided a recurring constraint may have a practice others can use.

Give the lesson a destination. Change an estimate assumption, a readiness check, an interface agreement, a training example or a risk response. Name the person who will make the change and the next activity where it should be used. Return to that activity to see whether the change helped.

Keep enough context for someone outside the original team to understand the lesson. As contractors and personnel change, the project needs to retain the reasoning behind its working methods as well as the documents.

Check what people experience

IPA's Team Development Index is one formal way the industry examines team development. Use the culture-readiness check below to start a practical discussion, and ask for concrete examples from the work. Could someone raise a concern before it became a delay? Did a promised decision arrive when needed? Was a challenge heard fairly? Did the team change a method after a lesson?

Compare experiences across organisations, disciplines, shifts and levels of seniority. Pair those conversations with evidence: overdue decisions, repeated handover failures, unresolved concerns and actions that keep reopening. A rise in reported issues may mean people are more willing to speak, so investigate the underlying events before treating the count as deterioration.

Agree a small number of changes and check them in practice. Keep the purpose clear to participants, protect candid responses and avoid turning an assessment into a competition between teams. The review should lead to a named improvement in how the team works.

Rebuild the agreements when the project changes

A stable core team can forget how much of its culture lives in unwritten knowledge. New contractors, a leadership change, a new shift pattern or the move into commissioning can expose that gap. Treat each transition as a reason to revisit the working arrangements.

• Explain the project's purpose and the practical team agreements during mobilisation.
• Introduce the people who own key interfaces and decisions, including deputies and escalation routes.
• Walk through a real example of raising a concern, changing a commitment and handing work over.
• Bring incoming operations or commissioning teams into readiness discussions before they inherit the outcome.
• Capture why important working methods exist before experienced people leave.

Check whether the routines still fit the new phase and workforce. Retain the behaviours that support honest, dependable work while changing the meetings, authority and handovers the next phase needs.

A practical first 30 days

Use this as a starting sequence for a new team or a reset of an existing one. Give each step an owner and work through actual delivery problems while establishing the habits.

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Choose an improvement the team can see. Closing a longstanding interface problem or providing a decision when promised gives people a reason to believe the agreements will matter. Report back on what changed, what remains unresolved and what the leadership team will do next.

The culture-readiness check

• People can explain the shared project outcome and the priorities for the next phase.
• Team agreements describe observable behaviours and apply to leaders as well as everyone else.
• The delivery rhythm produces ready work, useful decisions and clear handovers.
• People know how to raise a concern before they have the complete answer.
• Quieter voices and affected disciplines have a practical route into decisions.
• Responsibility comes with clear authority, capability and access to support.
• Recognition and performance measures support the whole delivery outcome.
• Lessons change a named part of the work and someone checks the result.
• New arrivals learn the working agreements, interfaces and escalation routes.
• Leaders regularly compare their intentions with what people experience.