This is a very bad year for the word “culture”, largely due to the Banking Royal Commission.

Every media article on Mr Justice Haye’s name-and-shame extravaganza uses the word at least twice; a “toxic culture” here, a “poisonous culture” there, a “culture of greed” all around. 

The royal commission lifted the lid off a number of organisations and let the public peer in, and the public’s mood could be described in a terms of a spike in demand for pitchforks and torches. 

It’s not just banks either. The RSL, private schools, and the Catholic Church have their own cultures, and all have been taking their lumps over problem behaviour.

The Liberal Party’s blokey biff and bonk culture is attracting unwanted attention. 

But companies, charities and community organisations that haven’t yet been hauled over the coals should probably meditate on the significance of the word “yet”. 

Consider for a moment if something major were to go wrong in your workplace, sports club or school, and the public were to get a good look at your culture. How would that play?

While hopefully most of us have nothing to worry about, it’s worth thinking for a moment about organisational culture, and how does one go about fixing it? 

It’s not as simple as just obeying the law, even though the various inquiries do tend to concentrate on the times when people haven’t.

Obeying the law, or reporting other people in an organisation when they don’t, isn’t enough.

You might even say that culture begins when the law stops.

No law can go into the kind of detail that will distinguish between a toxic culture of greed and rivalry, and a respectful and accommodating culture you’d like to work in. 

There is a lot of overlap between a destructive culture and a difficult workplace or organisation.

People don’t support each other, because they’re set against each other.

They’re reluctant to share information, because trust is lacking.

People want credit, but not responsibility.

Tearoom and party room gossip outranks official announcements.

Good people leave, nasty people prosper. There’s little sense of community, except where everybody’s grumbling together about their idiot bosses. 

Our Community works closely with not-for-profit groups, and many might assume those groups would have a major advantage in designing a humanist people-focused culture, where primary goals aren’t concerned with money, and people don’t get bonuses for fleecing mug punters. 

This doesn’t carry as far as it might, though, for while not-for-profits aren’t driven solely by money, they  don’t like losing it either.

We find, over and over again, that cover-ups tend to be driven by fear that if the news (of whatever it may be) got out into the public arena, then donors would flee and the budget for all the good things they do would collapse.

The more revered the institution, it would seem, the more need to bury scandals, and so people double down, avoiding washing their dirty linen in public.

Getting on top of this vicious circle and developing a healthier culture is a matter of trust, internal and external. 

A sound organisation is one where a whistleblower can trust management not to punish them for having been woken up, and where management trusts their stakeholders sufficiently to believe that it will cope with a public airing of the problem. 

A healthy culture has values that can’t be shuffled to avoid embarrassment, and enough self-respect to apologise when necessary. 

It requires rules, guidelines, and the flexibility to recognise where those rules and guidelines are providing misguided incentives.

Like so much else in business, and politics, and life, it comes down to common human decency.

And like so much else, it involves continuous vigilance. 

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise and B-corporation providing help to not-for-profits.