Webinar Recap: The Power of Kind Culture – Building Teams That Truly Thrive

What does it actually mean to build a kind workplace? Not a nice one – a kind one. And is there even a difference?

At London Speech Workshop, we believe kind cultures don’t happen by accident. They’re built deliberately, communicated clearly, and embedded into the everyday fabric of how teams work together. That’s exactly what we explored in our recent webinar, where we were joined by Ivy Deeprose, Employee Relations Lead at B Lab UK – a certified B Corporation whose entire mission is to use business as a force for good.

Kind is not the same as nice

This might be the most important distinction of the whole conversation.

Ivy put it simply: both kindness and niceness come from a place of care, but kindness adds something essential courage. In a culture that prizes niceness above all else, difficult conversations get avoided, honest feedback doesn’t land, and problems fester quietly under a surface of pleasantries. Ivy described it as “ruinous empathy” – where the desire not to rock the boat actually does more harm than good.

Emma (our host and LSW founder) offered a beautiful image: niceness is the ripple on the surface of a lake. Kindness goes all the way to the bottom. One is about appearances; the other is about humanity.

Kind cultures, by contrast, have the courage to challenge, give real feedback, manage performance honestly, and create space for people to speak up. As Ivy put it – in a high-pressure environment especially, you simply can’t afford not to be kind. You don’t have the bandwidth for the fallout that niceness without substance creates.

Kindness needs to be codified, not left to chance

One of Ivy’s core beliefs is that a great culture you arrived at by accident is a fragile one. B Lab UK experienced exactly this – rapid growth from 14 to 40+ employees brought a genuinely warm, relational culture, but one that existed largely by chance. The work became: how do you make that resilient?

Her answer: codify it. Commit things to policy. Name your values. Make them visible, specific, and lived.

At B Lab, this took the form of a participatory values review — working with colleagues through insight groups and co-creation sessions they called “Culture Lab” – to land on five values that are tightly linked to strategy:

• Bring out the best in everyone
• Go further together
• Be a force for good
• Choose courage over comfort
• Raise the bar

The values then became the backbone of what Ivy called a “Values Activation Toolkit” – a set of ways to make those values show up in daily work, not just on a wall.

Tools that actually work

Values Cards

One of the most adopted tools from B Lab’s toolkit is physical values cards – almost like playing cards, each printed with one of the organisation’s values and a short descriptor on the reverse. Teams use them in meetings and ideation sessions: everyone is given a card and becomes the “steward” of that value for the session.

The psychological power here is subtle but real. It gives people permission to speak up – particularly around the value “choose courage over comfort.” Rather than I am going to say something difficult, the frame becomes I’ve got the card – so I’m going to use it. It takes the personal threat out of challenge and makes courageous conversations feel shared and sanctioned.

The Moment of Joy

Emma shared one of LSW’s own rituals that she introduced about four years ago, rooted in positive psychology: starting every Monday and Wednesday team huddle with a “moment of joy.” Each person shares one thing – big or small – that brought them genuine joy recently. It might be biting into a perfect apple or something life-changing. Doesn’t matter.

What it does is signal, every single week: your whole self is welcome here. It opens a window into each person’s humanity and builds the kind of genuine connection that makes everything else – including the hard conversations – feel safer.

The White Elephant

Named for the elephant in the room (white being the colour of peace), this is one of Emma’s favourite tools for psychological safety. Every couple of months, the team is given an anonymous opportunity to submit any questions, challenges, or concerns they want to raise with senior leadership – anything they’ve been unsure about or haven’t felt able to say directly.

These are collected, then read out and discussed together over breakfast. The anonymity removes the personal risk. The ritual removes the formality. And the outcome is a leadership team that hears what’s really going on – not what people think they want to hear.

Ivy noted that your colleagues are your best form of intelligence. They see everything, feel everything. Creating structured, safe routes for their voices to reach leadership isn’t just kind – it’s smart risk management.

The Chocolate Rocket (The Chocometer)

Because kind cultures also need to be fun. LSW’s own take on this is the Chocolate Rocket – a way of gamifying targets and results by linking performance milestones to different levels of chocolate. It sounds simple because it is. But it works because it celebrates progress, makes results feel energising rather than pressurising, and reminds people that enjoying the journey matters.

The Sunflower: Recognition Done Properly

Recognition is often reduced to a “well done” that lands and is forgotten. Emma shared the Sunflower framework – a structured way to give meaningful recognition using three W’s and a RAY:

The three W’s identify what you’re recognising: Work Ethic, Work Attitude, or Work Quality (you can recognise one, two, or all three).

The RAY gives recognition its depth:

• R – Recognise: name the specific thing you’ve seen
• A – Acknowledge: describe the impact it’s had on you
• Y – Yay: express genuine thanks

The result is recognition that actually means something – because it’s specific, it’s seen, and it connects the person’s contribution to the people around them.

Kind cultures are built from the very first interaction

Both Emma and Ivy agreed: culture starts before day one. The language in your job advert, the tone of your application process, whether you send interview questions ahead of time (B Lab does this as standard, not as a reasonable adjustment) – all of these are early signals of what kind of organisation you are.

At LSW, the hiring process is built around values alignment first. Emma shared that every new hire, after their first week, has come to her and said some version of: I don’t know what you’ve done, but I’ve never experienced such a kind culture. That’s not an accident. It’s the result of hiring people who genuinely care about other people – and making sure that care is woven into every process and policy from the start.

The top tips

At the close of the session, both Ivy and Emma distilled their advice:

Ivy’s top tip: Decide what you can codify – and commit to it. Build cultural structures (values, policies, rituals) that are resilient to leadership changes, staff turnover, and shifting trends. Use your values and your policy landscape as the most lasting totems of your culture, and hook everything else off that foundation.

Emma’s top tip: Listen, and see the whole person. Use tools like the Moment of Joy and the White Elephant to create genuine spaces where voices are welcomed, not just tolerated. Knowing your voice is welcome is one of the most powerful things a workplace can give someone.

What kind culture has to do with communication

Here at London Speech Workshop, we come at this from the individual level – giving people the tools to communicate with clarity, kindness, and confidence. What today’s conversation made clear is how powerfully that connects to the organisational level.

When people feel psychologically safe, they communicate better. When leaders model kind courage – honest, caring, brave – teams follow. And when that communication is embedded in structure, it stops relying on heroic individuals and starts becoming the culture itself.

Kind cultures aren’t soft. They’re some of the most courageous, productive, and sustainable environments a business can build.

And it starts with one honest conversation at a time.

Ready to Take This Further?

If this conversation has inspired you and you’d like to explore one on one communication coaching, why not Book a free 15-minute Discovery Call with one of our team and see how we could support your communication journey.

For team training, you can book a Consultation call in with our B2B team here.

Watch It Back

If this has inspired you and you want to watch the webinar back, you can see it on Youtube here.