Head of Culture Job Description: Template, Scorecard & AI Prompts (2026)
Magnific
A Head of Culture is a dedicated leadership role focused on translating company values into observable daily behavior across the organisation. Best for companies between 200 and 2,000 employees that have a VP of People or CPO already in place, but need a focused operator to make culture an operating outcome rather than a side initiative.
This template is opinionated. It treats Head of Culture as a culture activation function, not an event-planning or employer-brand role. The framework draws on patterns observed across 350+ companies and reflects how the role has emerged in organisations that take culture seriously as a competitive advantage.
When to Hire a Head of Culture
Three conditions usually trigger this hire:
| Condition | What It Looks Like |
|---|---|
| Culture is a stated strategic priority but no one owns the operating model | Values are published, but daily behavior doesn't reflect them; no one is accountable for the gap |
| Scale is straining culture | The first generation of cultural norms — set by founders and early employees — no longer transmits naturally |
| Existing People function is full | The VP of People / CPO can articulate the culture problem but cannot dedicate the focus needed to own the operating model |
If two or more of these are true and the company is over 200 employees, the Head of Culture role typically pays back within 12–18 months.
What a Head of Culture Is Not
Three frequent mis-conceptions that lead to bad hires:
- Not an event planner. Offsites, parties, and culture events are sometimes part of the job, but they are not the job.
- Not an employer-brand or recruiting marketer. Employer brand and culture are related but separate functions.
- Not a generalist HRBP. The role is specialized, focused on translating values into daily behavior, with clear operating-cadence ownership.
The Head of Culture Job Description Template (Inline)
Copy and adapt to your company's voice.
Job Title: Head of Culture
Reports to: VP of People or Chief People Officer Location: [Hybrid / Remote / On-site] Team: [Direct reports, often 1–3 in the first year]
About the Role
We are looking for a Head of Culture who will treat our values as an operating system, not a poster. You will own the design and execution of how our values translate into daily team behavior — and how we measure whether that translation is working.
You will partner with the VP of People / CPO, the executive team, and every people manager in the company. You will build the operating cadence, the behavioral instrumentation, and the coaching surface that make our culture practiced rather than aspirational.
What You'll Own
- Values activation: Define the observable behaviors that map to each company value; publish the behavioral map; refresh as values evolve
- Operating cadence: Design and operate the recurring practices (recognition cadence, weekly pulse, feedback rituals, leader Q&As) that translate values into daily behavior
- Manager coaching surface: Build the manager-facing layer that translates culture signals into specific weekly nudges
- Behavioral measurement: Operate the team-level culture measurement system; deliver a quarterly culture scorecard to the executive team
- Onboarding integration: Embed the cultural operating system into the onboarding experience for every new hire
- Leadership integration: Equip executives and senior leaders to model cultural behaviors visibly and consistently
- Crisis and repair: Lead culture-repair work in the wake of high-stakes events (layoffs, incidents, reorgs)
What Success Looks Like
| 30 days | 90 days | 180 days | Year-end |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diagnose culture at the team level: where it holds, where it breaks, where it's missing | Ship the behavioral map and the first three operating-cadence interventions | Replatform the highest-leverage broken cultural practice; execute the first culture scorecard cycle | Demonstrably move the year-one KPIs |
Year-One KPIs
- Culture scorecard: Move the company-wide culture score by at least +10 points on the chosen measurement instrument
- Recognition cadence: Achieve 80%+ employees both giving and receiving recognition in any 90-day window
- Manager coaching adoption: 80%+ of people managers receive and act on at least one weekly cultural nudge
- Behavioral consistency: Reduce the inter-team variance on the cultural scorecard by at least 30%
- Onboarding embedding: Every new hire experiences the operating cadence within their first 30 days
- Leader modeling: 100% of executives visibly model the cultural behaviors quarterly
What We're Looking For
Required:
- 6+ years in People / Culture / Organisation Development roles
- Track record of building or operating a values-to-behavior translation system at a 200+ employee company
- Strong operating instincts: comfortable with cadence design, behavioral data, and manager-coaching surfaces
- Direct experience implementing or operating a continuous-feedback / culture-activation platform
- Excellent writing and facilitation skills
Strongly preferred:
- Prior Head of Culture or equivalent role at a fast-growth company
- Background in behavioral science, organisation development, or culture research
- Comfort with AI-assisted coaching and people analytics tooling
Disqualifying signals:
- Treating culture as events / perks / posters
- Annual-cadence default for cultural practice
- Inability to articulate how a manager's behavior moves a team-level cultural metric
- Discomfort with behavioral data or measurement
Compensation
- Base: [Range — typically $150K–$250K in US markets]
- Bonus / equity: [Structure]
- Benefits: [Highlights]
Interview Rubric
Score each candidate 1–5 on each dimension. A 4.0 average is the bar.
| Dimension | What "5" Looks Like |
|---|---|
| Behavioral translation | Can take one of our values and produce 3–5 observable behaviors in 10 minutes |
| Operating instinct | Defaults to weekly / daily cadence; can articulate the difference between measuring culture and activating it |
| Manager coaching frame | Has a working theory of how to scale culture coaching across hundreds of managers without one-on-one consultant time |
| Data fluency | Reads behavioral, sentiment, and outcome data fluidly; can structure a culture scorecard from a blank page |
| Tooling sophistication | Knows the modern category (engagement, recognition, coaching, analytics) and has opinions on where each fits |
| Crisis readiness | Has specific examples of leading cultural repair work after high-stakes events |
| Executive partnership | Can hold their own with the executive team; has examples of coaching senior leaders on cultural visibility |
Happily.ai's Reported Results
These are Happily-reported outcomes from customer data across 350+ organisations and 10M+ workplace interactions:
- 97% daily adoption rate (vs. ~25% industry average for engagement / culture tooling)
- 40% turnover reduction, equivalent to roughly $480K/year savings for a 100-person company
- +48 point eNPS improvement in the first 12 months
- 9× trust multiplier observed for employees who give recognition vs. those who do not
For competitor outcomes, ask each vendor for their published case studies and verified customer references.
How Happily.ai Supports the Head of Culture Role
Happily.ai is a Culture Activation platform built for the Head of Culture who needs to operate at scale. The platform delivers:
- Behavioral measurement at the team and manager level
- Recognition cadence built in with values-tagged workflow
- AI coaching nudges for every manager based on real behavioral data
- Quarterly scorecard auto-generated for the executive team
- 97% daily adoption vs. 25% industry average
The dataset shows that Heads of Culture who adopt a culture-activation operating model in their first 90 days outperform those who run a traditional events-and-posters model on every year-one KPI in this template.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What does a Head of Culture do? A: A Head of Culture owns the system that translates company values into observable daily behavior across the organisation. The role designs the operating cadence (recognition, feedback, rituals), builds the manager coaching surface, and operates the behavioral measurement that proves whether culture is being practiced.
Q: When should we hire a Head of Culture? A: Most companies hire a Head of Culture between 200 and 1,000 employees, after the VP of People or CPO is in place. The trigger is usually that culture is a stated strategic priority but no one owns the operating model end to end.
Q: How is a Head of Culture different from a VP of People? A: A VP of People owns the full people function (talent acquisition, performance, learning, culture, compliance). A Head of Culture owns the values-to-behavior translation specifically — typically reporting into the VP of People or CPO, with deeper specialization on the cultural operating model.
Q: How much does a Head of Culture cost? A: US base compensation typically ranges from $150K to $250K, plus bonus and equity. Adjust for industry, geography, and company stage.
Q: What's the difference between a Head of Culture and a Culture Manager? A: Title and seniority. A Head of Culture sits above Culture Managers, owns the strategy and operating model, and partners with the executive team. A Culture Manager executes within that operating model. Smaller companies (under 500) often have a Head of Culture without subordinate Culture Managers.
Q: What KPIs should a Head of Culture have? A: Six year-one KPIs work well: culture scorecard movement, recognition cadence breadth, manager coaching adoption, inter-team variance reduction, onboarding embedding, and leader modeling. Specific targets reflect company stage and starting baseline.
Adapting the Spec to Your Culture-Activation Maturity
Where the Head of Culture starts depends on what's already been built:
| Starting State | Where the Head of Culture Should Anchor First |
|---|---|
| Values published, no operating model | Build the values-to-behavior translation first (the behavioral map). Without this, every later cadence drifts. |
| Recognition program exists but stalled | Diagnose stall pattern (curator capacity, manager modeling drift, value contamination). Re-platform if needed. |
| Quarterly engagement survey only | Pair the survey with daily/weekly behavioral signals. Surveys without behavior data describe the past; behavior signals enable intervention. |
| Culture initiatives are siloed across functions | Consolidate into one operating cadence with executive sponsorship. Multiple competing "culture programs" produce noise without lift. |
| Culture broken post-incident (layoffs, scandal, leadership change) | Trust repair before any new program. Frequent communication, visible accountability, deliberate recognition cadence. New initiatives wait until the trust signal stabilizes. |
The Head of Culture's first 90 days should pick exactly one of these as the binding constraint. Trying to address all of them simultaneously produces a busy quarter and no measurable lift.
AI Prompts: Tailor the JD, Diagnose the Culture, Run the Search
Prompt 1 — Adapt the JD to your culture-activation maturity
Adapt the inline Head of Culture JD above to my company:
- Stage / size: [...]
- Current culture-activation maturity (using the table above): [...]
- The single hardest cultural problem we have today: [...]
- Existing People-team structure: [...]
- The reason culture is now a strategic priority (be specific —
what triggered the hire?): [...]
Output the adapted JD with:
- Reordered "What You'll Own" reflecting actual priorities
- Year-one KPIs calibrated to my baseline
- An "Honest about this role" section (3 things that make this
role hard so the right candidate self-selects in)
- Disqualifying signals tailored to my context
The goal: a JD that filters out events-and-perks candidates and
attracts operators.
Prompt 2 — Generate the culture-activation case study for finalists
Design a 2-hour case study for Head of Culture finalists. Set in
a company that looks like ours: [stage, size, dominant culture
problem, current operating cadence].
The case must:
- Force a translation exercise (turn one of our values into 3-5
observable behaviors for a specific function)
- Force a measurement design choice (what would they instrument,
weekly vs. quarterly, why)
- Force a manager-coaching scale exercise (how to coach 100
managers without 1:1 consultant time)
- End with a 30-min live conversation with the VP of People
Output the case prompt, the data the candidate sees, the 3 panel
questions, and the scoring rubric mapped to the 7 scorecard
dimensions.
Prompt 3 — Generate behavioral interview questions
For each of the 7 Head of Culture scorecard dimensions (Behavioral
translation, Operating instinct, Manager coaching frame, Data fluency,
Tooling sophistication, Crisis readiness, Executive partnership):
- 2 behavioral interview questions
- The "5" answer
- The "3" answer
- The "1" answer (disqualifying)
- The follow-up that separates a 4 from a 5
Avoid hypotheticals. Favor "tell me about a time" with
specific drill-down.
Prompt 4 — Translate one of your values into a behavioral map
Take one of our company values and translate it into a behavioral
map suitable for our recognition program, manager coaching, and
hiring rubrics.
Value: [name]
What we mean by it (1 paragraph): [...]
Where it shows up well today (examples): [...]
Where it does NOT show up (examples): [...]
Output:
- 5 observable behaviors that should trigger recognition under
this value
- 2 behaviors that look like the value but actually corrode it
(the "performance trap")
- 1 question we should ask in interviews to surface candidates
who naturally exhibit this value
- 1 manager-coaching nudge that strengthens this behavior in
practice
Prompt 5 — Generate the 90-day diagnostic plan for the new Head of Culture
Generate a 90-day diagnostic plan for a new Head of Culture in
our company.
Inputs:
- Current culture-activation maturity: [...]
- Top 3 cultural concerns from leadership: [...]
- Available data sources: [...]
- The single thing the CEO wants to be true at day 90: [...]
Output:
- Days 1-30: pure listening + behavioral data audit (specific people
to talk to, specific data to pull, specific patterns to look for)
- Days 31-60: synthesis + first hypotheses (which culture-activation
maturity row are we actually in, what's the binding constraint)
- Days 61-90: ship one visible behavioral cadence (which one,
why it's first, the leading indicator)
Avoid "stand up a culture committee" recommendations. Favor specific
behavioral interventions with measurement.
These prompts work because they impose the values-to-behavior framing on AI output. Generic Head of Culture prompts produce events-and-perks job descriptions. Framework-anchored prompts produce specs that filter for operators.
Tareef is a product-focused innovator passionate about data, design, and using tech for good. He believes technology should make us better: happier, and healthier.
