How to Build a Culture That Lasts

It won’t be a stretch to say that most of today’s companies suffer from burnout, which often leads to high staff turnover and recruitment challenges. To battle these issues, a company must have a strong corporate culture that is honest and shaped by real people working there, not by top-down decrees. 

The culture-building journey at EvenBet Gaming began with listening to our team’s needs and real involvement. And our today’s expert, Daria Fot, played a fundamental role in shaping the new system. Daria has led HR departments across various sectors and has built the department from scratch since joining EvenBet Gaming six years ago. Her experience has shaped the HR strategy, onboarding, development, and internal communications. In this approach, HR isn’t just about managing people, it’s about shaping business, culture, and creating a workplace where people genuinely want to be. In this article, Daria shares the main pillars that hold a successful HR strategy and help the company thrive.

Culture Works for Employee Retention

First of all, culture should be organic. This means real principles that are observed by the whole company, not just pretty slogans on a welcome card. These principles should exist on all company levels and be lived in, day after day. At EvenBet Gaming, this organic culture was shaped from the inside out.

We built values by first listening to the employees. In engagement surveys across 2023 and 2024, we assessed how people actually describe their experience: what they value, what makes them proud, and what they want to see changed. Then, we were able to develop the core values with a cross‑team working group and the company’s leadership, compiling real examples and even anti‑examples into each statement. This hybrid bottom-up/top-down model ensured that values were both authentic and aligned with strategic goals.

Engaging employees in shaping values gives them ownership. Employees stick around when they feel seen, supported, and like a purposeful part of something bigger. According to the global SHRM 2024 survey, workers who rate their culture good or excellent are nearly four times more likely to stay, and only about 15% of them seek new roles. Compare this to 57% of people actively seeking new jobs at organisations with poor culture. Indeed, culture is a major retention driver.

In our experience, team-building events and business games help break walls, promote peer alignment, embed soft skills, and reinforce values through lived practice. Horizontal bonds grow through peer recognition programmes, open forums, and spontaneous shout‑outs where colleagues praise each other’s alignment with values in real time. Teams nominate examples of behaviour that reflect shared values, building culture visibility and personal accountability. At EvenBet, this organic approach to culture led to a noticeable uplift in engagement and a sharp decline in attrition.

Corporate Culture and Referral Hiring

A living, inclusive culture transforms your team into authentic brand ambassadors. When people feel genuinely comfortable at work, they become sincere champions of the company, recommending it to friends and acquaintances. Across the industry, research shows that companies with referral schemes often close up to half of their vacant spots with referred candidates, despite having many more organic job-seekers. Besides, almost 90% of employers name referrals as the top source of high-quality hires.

The psychological chain of referral hiring is quite straightforward: culture → comfort → trust → conversion.

• Comfort: employees feel seen, supported, and part of a cohesive team.
• Trust: comfort creates belief in their employer and peers.
• Conversion: trustworthy recommendations carry more weight and deliver quality candidates for the company.

When culture is felt, not feigned, employees confidently recommend their workplace to their friends. And when their recommendations work, they refer again, thus creating a pipeline of quality, committed hires and driving down the cost of hiring along the way.

Strong Culture Prevents Burnout 

Creating a culture that can really fight staff burnout isn’t posting about corporate values on your LinkedIn page — it’s cultivating a psychologically safe environment where discussing struggles is normal and not seen as a weakness. At EvenBet Gaming, we recognise that the power of culture lies in the everyday internal ecosystem, not on paper.

EvenBet introduced a structured system of regular one-to-one meetings between HR, managers, and employees, aimed precisely at detecting early signs of fatigue or dissatisfaction. Through this proactive dialogue, voluntary turnover dropped from 16% in 2021 to 8% in 2022, while reasons related to burnout, career stagnation, dissatisfaction, or functional mismatch decreased by 50%. Our approach sends a clear message: mental wellness is a shared responsibility, not an individual issue — and it begins with real conversation.

The 2024 global culture report finds that poor workplace culture increases the odds of moderate-to-severe burnout by as much as 157%, largely because of unaddressed stress, lack of recognition, and unclear roles. On the other hand, corporate cultures grounded in frequent feedback, trusted relationships, and flexibility dramatically reduce burnout risk.

EvenBet formalised mentor programs, Individual Development Plans (IDPs), and peer recognition initiatives, ensuring that employees feel seen and valued. Flexible working arrangements like hybrid work and defined hours are also part of the mix. Another ingredient is setting clear expectations around working hours, encouragement to take leave, and providing support for personal working rhythms.

Why Following Culture Cannot Be an Order

Attempting to establish culture through top-down rules is like trying to paint in black and white: the shapes seem right, but there’s little depth and authenticity. At EvenBet Gaming, we believe that corporate culture must come from internal voices and shared experience.

There’s a clear difference between values proclaimed by the company’s leadership and enacted culture, which is how employees actually live and experience work. The big cultural gap between the two often leads to lower productivity and poorer firm performance. If employees feel that corporate values are imposed rather than lived, the leadership will see a lot of cynicism as a response. On the contrary, bottom-up involvement, where employees actively help define and enact values, boosts engagement and leads to measurable gains in energy, dedication, and productivity. 

We designed culture-building with these guiding principles:

• Grassroots initiatives: teams propose and pilot cultural practices.
• Iterative refinement: staff feedback guides which behaviours become standard.
• Visible accountability: leaders participate, but do not dictate the how.
• Ceremonies and rituals: shared storytelling, recognition, and reflection anchor values in real life.
• Regular check-ins: we listen and act.

Companies that rely on grassroots cultures often overcome crises and struggles more easily thanks to strong inter-departmental ties and collective problem-solving that become second nature, while cultures dominated by blame and hierarchy create fear, reduce knowledge-sharing, and increase stress in employees. By contrast, top-down culture isn’t adaptive. It fails over time because it lacks relevance to employees’ daily realities. At EvenBet, co-created culture feels alive, personal, and evolving, fuelled by the people who live it: our cross-functional value working groups ensured that every team member has a voice. We built culture through voluntary initiatives, peer‑recognition programmes, and community norms, living by our values in action, not just proclaiming them.

Investing in Culture or Just Simulating It?

A strong corporate culture cannot be a pretence, it must be real and lived every single day. When culture becomes nothing more than rhetoric, values decreed by the leadership, it can only smooth over the issues it claims to solve, but it does not create any real strengths within the team. But when it’s authentically co-created and rooted in employee voice, it becomes a powerful investment.

At EvenBet Gaming, culture is crafted by people and for people. Data shows that our voluntary turnover fell by 2 times between 2021–2022, as reasons tied to fatigue and dissatisfaction halved. This kind of improvement doesn’t come from slogans, it comes from real investment in human connection and inclusion.

So here’s the question for all leaders: are you ready to entrust corporate culture to your people and let them shape it from the bottom up? To delegate ownership. To value the voices of your employees. To embed culture in daily rituals, open feedback, and shared stories.

Culture built this way pays dividends: higher retention, more trusted referrals, healthier teams — and a workplace that feels genuine, aligned, and alive. If you're ready to shift from culture as decor to culture as life, then you're ready to start reshaping your company’s future, one authentic interaction at a time.