Audits: How to Make Your Culture Toxic

Audit season doesn't reveal your culture. It creates one. And in most regulated organisations, that culture is built on fear, performance, and a collective pretence that nobody is allowed to name until the auditor has left the building.

I've been in those rooms.

Not as the auditor. As the person watching what happens to an organisation in the weeks before one arrives. I've seen colleagues who were competent, experienced professionals turn into something unrecognisable. Anxious. Performative. Quietly resentful of the manager who keeps calling meetings that feel less like preparation and more like interrogation.

I've watched managers I respected — people who genuinely cared about their teams — do things in audit season they would never do in January. Micro-checking work that had been done correctly for years. Sending emails at 11pm to remind people of procedures they already knew. Standing over shoulders with a clipboard energy that said, without words: I don't trust you. And neither of us can say that out loud.

I've been in the briefing where the quality director said, with absolute sincerity: "We just need everyone to stay calm." And watched twelve people get visibly less calm in real time.

Nobody designed any of this. Nobody said: let's make our people dread the next six weeks. It happened because audit anxiety is a legitimate, serious, organisational phenomenon — and almost no one talks about it honestly.

What Audit Season Actually Does to a Team

Here is what happens in the run-up to a major external inspection in most regulated companies. Read it and see if any of it is familiar.

The senior team becomes visibly anxious. Their anxiety is rational — the stakes are real. A critical finding on an ISO 13485 audit can stall a product launch. An FDA Form 483 observation can trigger months of remediation activity. The consequences are commercial, reputational, and personal. Leaders feel them acutely.

That anxiety travels downward. Because leaders with unmanageable uncertainty do what humans do: they try to manage everything they can see. They hold more meetings. They ask more questions. They check work that doesn't need checking. The implicit message received by the team — even when it isn't intended — is: we don't believe you're ready.

Employees respond to that message in one of two ways. Some become anxious themselves — the specific dread of someone who knows their stuff but has just been made to doubt it. Others become performative — focused on demonstrating readiness to their manager rather than developing it. Both responses are rational adaptations to the environment. Neither builds genuine competence.

And then the auditor arrives. And the culture the organisation spent six weeks building — fearful, performative, tuned to the internal hierarchy rather than the external examiner — is precisely the wrong culture for the room they're now in.

The Thing Nobody Is Allowed to Say

Audit readiness is hard. Not complicated-hard. Human-hard.

The process is structured. The standards are documented. The requirements are knowable. But the examination is a live conversation with a stranger who will ask questions the team hasn't prepared for, in a sequence they can't predict, in conditions that produce in normal human beings exactly the kind of cognitive freeze that looks, to an experienced auditor, like uncertainty about the process rather than uncertainty about the question.

Training doesn't fix this. Briefings don't fix this. Another run-through of the non-conformance procedure does not prepare a person for the moment an FDA investigator asks them to walk through what they'd do if they weren't sure something crossed the threshold — and then says: and what if your line manager wasn't available?

The honest thing — the thing the compliance industry has been collectively avoiding for twenty years — is this: you cannot brief people into examination readiness. You can only practise them into it.

And most organisations never give their people the chance to practise. The first time most employees face examination conditions — unfamiliar examiner, unexpected questions, genuine stakes — is the actual audit. Everything before that was preparation for a different, easier thing.

The toxic culture isn't a character flaw. It's the predictable result of asking people to perform something they've never done, in conditions they've never experienced, with consequences they feel acutely and can't control.

What Confidence Actually Looks Like

The managers I've seen handle audit season well share one thing. Not better documentation. Not more rigorous briefings. They know where their gaps are. Not suspected. Known.

When you have actual data on which team members are solid, which are fragile in specific process areas, and where the team as a whole carries the most risk — you stop needing to watch everything. You stop sending the 11pm emails. You stop standing over shoulders. You direct your energy precisely, because you know precisely where it's needed.

That's what Real Talk's audit readiness simulations do.

Employees practise with an AI examiner that asks the unexpected question. The follow-up. The edge case. In conditions that are private, low-stakes, and designed specifically for repetition — so that the first time they face an unfamiliar examiner asking something off-script, it isn't the real thing. They've been there before. They know what that moment feels like and they know they can move through it.

Managers get the data. Not a completion record. A granular picture of readiness — by person, by process area — before the auditor arrives. The fog lifts. The 11pm emails stop. The briefings become targeted rather than frantic.

The culture changes. Not because anyone gave a speech about psychological safety. Because the anxiety that was driving the toxic behaviour — the unmanageable uncertainty — has been replaced with something more useful.

Evidence.

Audit season will always carry stakes. The question is whether your organisation carries those stakes together — or whether it turns them on your own people first.

Which one is happening in your building right now?

Real Talk Studio builds pressure-tested simulations for regulated enterprises — designed to generate the audit-ready evidence of competence that the Worker Protection Act, Consumer Duty, and the Equality Act now demand. Find out more at realtalkstudio.com