Stop Blaming Your People: What Can Workplace Culture Learn from India's Cleanest City?

I spent four years studying engineering in Indore, so I feel a slightly personal sense of pride when I see the city ranked as India’s cleanest year after year.

What makes the story more interesting is where Indore started.

In 2014, it ranked 149th in India’s cleanliness rankings. A few years later, the same city, with largely the same citizens, had become the benchmark other cities were trying to learn from.

That raises a fascinating behavior-change question:

How do you change the everyday habits of more than three million people?

Because if a city can change how millions of people dispose of waste, organizations should be able to learn something about changing the behavior of a few thousand employees.

And Indore’s story offers five particularly useful lessons.

1. Leadership Has to Treat Culture Change as a Real Priority

A major turning point came when Municipal Commissioner Manish Singh took charge of Indore’s cleanliness mission.

One of the principles associated with the transformation was simple:

Fix the system before blaming the people.

That is an important distinction.

It would have been easy to say that Indore was dirty because its citizens lacked civic sense. Instead, the administration treated waste management as a system that needed redesigning.

Leadership set the ambition, removed obstacles, put resources behind it and stayed closely involved in execution.

This is where many organizational culture programs struggle.

A CEO announces a new culture. HR creates workshops, posters and communication campaigns. A few months later, leaders have moved on to the next priority.

Employees notice.

If leaders say collaboration matters but continue rewarding leaders who hoard information, the real culture is obvious.

If leaders say experimentation matters but punish every failure, employees quickly learn what the organization actually values.

Culture is shaped far more by what leaders repeatedly reinforce than by what they announce.

The workplace lesson

Culture change cannot sit solely with HR.

Senior leaders need to visibly own the behaviors they want the organization to adopt and continue reinforcing them long after the launch event is over.

2. Make the Right Behavior Easier

Indore did not simply tell three million people:

“Please keep the city clean.”

It changed the environment around them.

The city dramatically expanded door-to-door waste collection, deployed GPS-tracked garbage vehicles and created a large sanitation workforce to make collection reliable.

It also removed many roadside garbage bins.

That decision is particularly interesting from a behavioral science perspective.

The city did not depend entirely on motivation. It redesigned the environment so that the desired behavior became easier and the old behavior became harder.

Organizations often do the opposite.

They ask employees to collaborate while performance systems reward individual achievement.

They ask managers to coach their teams while calendars are packed with operational meetings.

They ask employees to experiment but require five approvals before trying anything new.

Then they wonder why behavior has not changed.

Sometimes the problem is not motivation. The environment is simply producing exactly the behavior it was designed to produce.

The workplace lesson

When you want a behavior to change, examine the systems surrounding it.

Look at incentives, performance management, workflows, meeting structures, technology, approval processes and job design.

If the environment rewards the old behavior, another training program will struggle to overcome it.

3. Translate Culture Into Specific Behaviors

“Keep Indore clean” is an aspiration.

Segregate your household waste before collection is a behavior.

That difference matters.

One of Indore’s major priorities was getting citizens to separate waste at source. Instead of leaving cleanliness as a vague concept, people were taught exactly what they needed to do with wet, dry and hazardous waste.

Organizations frequently make culture change far more abstract.

Be innovative.

Demonstrate ownership.

Collaborate better.

Put customers first.

These phrases sound good on walls, but they leave employees to interpret what the culture actually expects from them.

Take “collaboration.”

What does collaboration mean on Tuesday afternoon?

It might mean sharing information with another team before they ask for it.

Inviting someone from another function into a decision earlier.

Giving credit publicly to a colleague who contributed to your work.

Asking for input before finalizing a solution.

Those are behaviors.

Culture becomes actionable only when people can see what they are supposed to do differently.

The workplace lesson

Instead of launching ten values with fifteen behaviors underneath each one, identify a small number of behaviors that would make the biggest difference.

Then make those behaviors specific enough that an employee can actually practise them.

4. Culture Needs Consequences

Indore combined education with enforcement.

Citizens could face fines for failing to segregate waste or for dumping garbage in public areas.

The message was clear: cleanliness was no longer an optional aspiration.

Organizations are often much more comfortable celebrating desired behaviors than confronting behaviors that undermine the culture.

That creates a problem.

Imagine an organization says respectful leadership is one of its core values.

Then a high-performing manager repeatedly humiliates employees in meetings and nothing happens because they deliver their numbers.

Employees learn something very quickly.

They learn that performance matters more than respect.

The poster on the wall becomes irrelevant.

Every culture has consequences, whether they are deliberately designed or not.

People watch who gets promoted, who receives bonuses, whose behavior gets challenged and whose behavior gets quietly tolerated.

Those signals teach the culture.

The workplace lesson

If a behavior genuinely matters, there must be some consequence attached to it.

That does not always mean punishment. Consequences can include recognition, access to opportunities, feedback, performance discussions or promotion decisions.

But if the organization repeatedly tolerates behavior that contradicts its stated culture, employees will believe the behavior rather than the words.

5. Stories Turn Behavior Into Social Norms

One of the most interesting parts of Indore’s transformation was that cleanliness gradually became part of the city’s identity.

Citizens started policing the norm themselves.

Stories circulated about people being challenged for littering, sanitation workers confronting people who threw garbage on the street, and residents taking pride in protecting Indore’s clean-city status.

At this point, something important had happened.

The administration was no longer the only force encouraging cleanliness.

The community itself was reinforcing the behavior.

This is incredibly powerful inside organizations too.

Every company has stories.

The leader who stayed late to help another team meet a deadline.

The manager who admitted they made the wrong decision.

The employee who challenged a senior leader because a customer was being treated unfairly.

The executive who gave someone else credit for an idea.

These stories quietly teach people:

“This is what people like us do here.”

And that message can be much more influential than another slide explaining company values.

The workplace lesson

Actively find and share stories that demonstrate the culture you want.

Not polished corporate case studies. Real moments where employees made a choice that reflected the desired behavior.

Those stories create social proof and help turn individual behaviors into organizational norms.

The Culture Change System

Looking at Indore’s transformation, the pattern is surprisingly relevant to organizations.

1. Leadership commits to the change.

2. Systems make the desired behavior easier.

3. People understand exactly what behavior is expected.

4. Rewards and consequences reinforce those behaviors.

5. Stories turn repeated behavior into a social norm.

This is also why culture programs so often disappoint.

Organizations pick one piece of the system.

They run training.

Or change incentives.

Or launch a communication campaign.

Or bring in a technology platform.

Or ask leaders to give a passionate speech at the annual town hall.

Any one of these interventions may help, but behavior change rarely comes from one intervention working in isolation.

A training program can build capability.

A platform such as the Nudgeable Action Management Platform can help convert that learning into specific actions and prompt people to practise those behaviors at work.

But if leaders behave differently, systems reward the old culture and undesirable behavior has no consequences, nudges alone cannot carry the entire change.

That is the bigger lesson from Indore.

Large-scale behavior change requires the environment, leadership and everyday actions to point in the same direction.

When they do, something interesting happens.

People gradually stop experiencing the new behavior as a “change initiative.”

It simply becomes:

“How we do things here.”

And that is when culture has actually changed.