The Financial Reporting Council

The FRC sets the UK Corporate Governance Code. In 2016, they’d published a landmark study on culture in business. Five years later, the world had moved — pandemic, hybrid working, sharpened scrutiny on DEI, board-level pressure on ESG. The 2016 evidence base no longer matched the conversations boards were having. The FRC needed an independent, FTSE-level read on how Chairs and CEOs were now framing, measuring and embedding culture. The findings would shape national governance guidance.

We brought two things to the brief: deep credentials in organisational culture, and the senior-room access to ask hard questions of the people running Britain’s biggest companies. We ran 24 in-depth interviews with FTSE Chairs, CEOs and NEDs — Vodafone, Rolls-Royce, Tate & Lyle among them. A thematic analysis surfaced the patterns. Then we tested those patterns in roundtables with culture practitioners, pushing harder on the insights that mattered. The output: a research report rigorous enough to underpin national policy.