There was a time when culture took care of itself. New employees learned how things worked by watching the people around them. They picked up the unwritten rules in the break room, in the hallway after a tough meeting, in the way a veteran teammate handled an upset customer. Culture traveled by proximity, and proximity was free.

That time is over. With teams split between home offices, headquarters and everywhere in between, the ambient transmission of culture has gone quiet. Recent workforce research confirms what a lot of leaders are already feeling: most employees still say culture matters, but far fewer can describe their organization’s culture as clearly defined or consistently lived. Words like uneven, reactive and vague come up instead.

Why does this matter? Because when culture goes undefined, it doesn’t go away. It fragments. Every team, every manager, every remote employee starts writing their own version of how things get done here. One department rewards speed while another rewards caution. One manager expects cameras on while another never turns hers on at all. Before long you have five cultures under one logo, and none of them were chosen on purpose.

And leaders are often the last to see it. Research consistently shows leaders are far more likely than frontline employees to believe their culture is clear and well defined. From the corner office, the values on the wall look like the values in practice. From the front line, the gap is obvious.

So what do you do when culture no longer reinforces itself? You reinforce it deliberately, through behaviors rather than posters.

Start by naming the behaviors that express each value. If collaboration is a stated value, what does collaboration look like on a Tuesday afternoon for a hybrid team? Does it mean responding to a colleague within a day? Sharing credit in the meeting where the work is presented? Bringing a dissenting view forward before the decision instead of after? Values stay aspirational until someone translates them into observable behavior.

Then look at your rhythms. Culture used to ride along on physical routines: the morning huddle, the shared lunch, the walk to the parking lot. Distributed teams need designed rhythms to replace the accidental ones. Maybe that’s a weekly check-in that opens with recognition. Maybe it’s a monthly conversation about how a recent decision reflected (or contradicted) a stated value. Even the simple practice of narrating the why behind changes, rather than just announcing the what, carries culture a surprising distance.

Finally, watch what gets rewarded. Employees will always believe the culture they experience over the culture they’re told about. If the stated value is balance but the promotions go to the people answering email at midnight, then the midnight email is the culture.

None of this requires a reorganization. It requires attention and intention. I’ve noticed the organizations navigating this shift well aren’t the ones with the best culture decks. They’re the ones where leaders decided that if culture no longer travels on its own, they’d carry it themselves: in what they name, what they model and what they reward.

Your culture is still being taught every day. Make sure you’re the one teaching it.