In Fast Company, Nitish Upadhyaya and Michelle DiMartino Explain How to ‘Read the Room’ to Spot Culture Risks

In Fast Company, Nitish Upadhyaya, Director of Behavioral Insights at Ropes & Gray’s R&G Insights Lab and Michelle DiMartino, Organizational Research & Design Specialist at Ropes & Gray’s R&G Insights Lab, authored an article titled, “Reading the room: How to spot culture risks at your company while you can still fix them,” examining how organizations can detect and address culture risks before they become a crisis.

Nitish and Michelle caution that annual engagement surveys, while useful, often capture abstract sentiment, lag real conditions, and can be skewed by social desirability bias. The result is false reassurance that misses emerging issues that drive attrition, harm reputation, and erode performance.

The authors advocate a more dynamic, experience-based approach: pair qualitative methods – confidential interviews and focus groups that surface real workplace stories – with behavioral indicators from human resources and helpline data to “read the room” in real time.

They offer a practical framework from cultural psychology – the four I’s: Ideas, Institutions, Interactions, and Individuals – to diagnose where incentives, leadership signals, and day‑to‑day behaviors are misaligned. When leaders listen for signals across these dimensions and calibrate incentives, messaging, and practices accordingly, ethical decision‑making becomes the natural path to success.

Culture, Nitish and Michelle conclude, is a living system that demands continuous, data‑informed attention.