Insight: Culture & Community in the workplace
Sean Willcock, Director at Davenport Campbell, shares insight on the importance of culture and community in the workplace.
We all know that "culture matters", but it's harder to point to where it actually lives. Culture isn’t found on your website. Real culture shows up in lived behaviour: how colleagues treat each other, how teams solve problems, the in‑jokes, rituals and support people give each other.
In a modern workplace, a ‘Neighbourhood’ is where you sit, but a ‘Community’ is who you belong with. In hybrid workplaces, culture brings people in; community makes them stay. Think of the project teams working together, the wellness crew (not me), and the secret cohort debriefing on Love Island over lunch… these are the micro-communities are the special sauce.
Culture greases the wheel; community keeps it spinning.
The data is surfacing slowly:
83% of Australian workers perform better when they feel they belong (Randstad Workmonitor 2025).
62% of Australian workers would leave if they don't feel a sense of belonging. (Randstad Workmonitor 2025).
Yet, 20% of global employees report feeling lonely at work daily (Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2025).
The gap between culture and community is real. Culture is a top-down narrative, whereas community is built through peer-to-peer belonging. The workplaces that win in 2026 will be the ones that are designed for belonging, not just branding. So the goal for 2026 – let’s create workplaces that launch the communities we crave.
Author: Sean Willcock, Director at Davenport Campbell
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