Corporate culture, once a headline concern in the wake of corporate scandal, has quietly slipped down the agenda of the business world. The decline raises uncomfortable questions about who is accountable for how companies treat the people who work in them.
Search data tells the story. Google’s public trends tool, which scores the relative popularity of search terms from 0 to 100, shows that “corporate culture” peaked at 100 between March 31 and April 30, 2004. That was the moment the term was hottest, in the aftermath of the collapse of energy giant Enron and the demise of Big Five accounting firm Arthur Andersen, when regulators, boards and the public were demanding answers about how corporations were run. By the period between March 31 and April 30, 2020, the score had fallen to 13. Between September 3 and October 31, 2026, it dropped further, to 10.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/platform-for-success/202611/why-is-corporate-culture-declining-in-importance.
The authors of a recent Psychology Today analysis, published November 1, 2026 and reviewed by Jessica Schrader, suspect the decline reflects a growing obsession with operational efficiency through humans working alongside artificial intelligence, a priority that has eclipsed attention to employee well-being in many firms. Their argument is that as analytical thinking and technical competence become commoditized by AI, the decisive competitive asset will be perceived trustworthiness, not traditional culture programs.
The counterexample they examine is instructive precisely because it shows how governance structure, not managerial goodwill, determines whether employee well-being survives pressure from owners. The Gund Company, a materials business founded by Ed Gund in 1951 and now approaching $400 million in annual sales, supplies components to industrial customers including General Electric and Rockwell Automation. It has averaged 18% annual growth for a decade and recorded zero layoffs in that period. The firm has not laid off workers in 75 years, an achievement The Wall Street Journal marked with a Page 1 headline: “Bosses Seek Secrets of Firm With No Layoffs in 75 Years.”
CEO Steve Gund, who leads the third-generation, privately owned firm and its 1,300 employees, describes a culture that puts worker well-being ahead of short-term profit. “It sounds touchy-feely, but it is profitable,” he told the Journal, according to the analysis (Pohle, 2026). The company’s practices include hiring sparingly so employees can weather leaner times, red cards posted around the office on which employees can write ideas and concerns directly to the CEO, bypassing the hierarchy, and individual development plans for every employee kept separate from compensation. Company financials are posted throughout the workplace under categories covering the business, customers, and care for one another through low injury rates, peer recognition and support in personal crises.
But the authors decline to treat the Gund Company as a model others can simply copy. “We’re in the bowels of industrial manufacturing. If we can do this, anybody can do this,” Gund says. The authors disagree, and their reasoning is structural. The firm is privately owned with an employee stock ownership program under which workers hold 30% of the equity. That ownership structure effectively mandates that boards of directors and chief executives take corporate culture seriously, because the people affected by decisions hold real power within the company.
The accountability question sharpens when ownership changes. When companies go public or are absorbed into private equity portfolios, the authors argue, structure beats good intentions. Owners demand that management demonstrate quarterly and annual growth in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, and corporate culture takes a back seat. Public companies that resist this pressure, such as Costco, exist but are rare, in the authors’ assessment.
The analysis concludes that the traditional concept of corporate culture, focused on how full-time employees treat each other and their customers, may be giving way to something broader: perceived institutional trust. That standard asks how customers, full-time employees, interim workers and AI systems all work together, and whether the institution as a whole is seen as trustworthy. Most U.S. public companies and private equity portfolio firms, consumed by short-term EBITDA gains, fail to take the long-range steps needed to earn that trust. Whether boards and owners treat that failure as a governance problem, rather than a cultural one, may determine how the next two decades of search trends read.