The Hidden Culture Carriers: How 10% of Your Workforce is Shouldering 70% of Your Company Culture

A groundbreaking study of 23,301 employees reveals the invisible burden crushing your top contributors—and what leaders must do about it.

Sarah felt it before she could name it. As a senior marketing manager at a fast-growing tech company, she found herself the go-to person for peer feedback requests, the one colleagues turned to for recognition and support, and somehow always the first to congratulate others on their wins. It wasn't until she started tracking her time that the reality hit her: she was spending nearly four hours per review cycle just responding to feedback requests—time that came directly out of her evenings and weekends.

Sarah isn't alone. In fact, she represents a troubling pattern that's hiding in plain sight across organizations worldwide.

The 70/10 Rule: A Startling Workplace Reality

New research from Happily.ai, analyzing 23,301 employees across 17 companies over 18 months, has uncovered what we're calling the 70/10 rule: the top 10% of employees are giving 70% of all workplace recognition and providing 54% of peer feedback responses. These same individuals are also receiving 54% of all feedback requests, creating an invisible workload that's crushing your most engaged contributors.

The concentration was far more extreme than anticipated. Organizations are essentially asking a tiny minority to carry the cultural load for entire companies.

The numbers paint a stark picture of workplace inequality that goes far beyond compensation or title disparities. Using economic analysis typically reserved for wealth distribution studies, the research reveals Gini coefficients of 0.82 for recognition given and 0.73 for recognition received—levels that would be considered extreme inequality in any economic context.

The Invisible Tax on Your Best People

Behind these statistics lies a human cost that most leaders never see. The research identified what they term the "time tax"—the hidden burden placed on culture carriers that amounts to 17 minutes per peer feedback response, with heavy contributors logging up to four hours per review cycle.

But the impact goes deeper than time. Pulse data shows that top-quartile contributors report 12% higher fatigue levels than their peers. Perhaps most concerning, these high-giving employees applied for 18% fewer stretch roles in the prior year, citing "review fatigue" as a primary factor.

During follow-up interviews, contributors used telling language to describe their experience: "default helper," "always on call," and "invisible work." One contributor put it bluntly: "I love helping people grow, but I didn't realize I'd become the unofficial performance review coordinator for half my department."

The Four Types of Culture Contributors

The research identified four distinct behavioral patterns across the workforce:

Culture Champions (26%): These employees both give and receive high levels of recognition, creating positive reciprocal relationships that energize teams.

Unsung Heroes (10%): The most at-risk group, these individuals disproportionately give recognition and feedback but rarely receive equivalent acknowledgment. They're the invisible engine keeping company culture running.

Beneficiaries (18%): Employees who receive more recognition and feedback than they provide, often newer team members or those in certain roles.

The Silent Majority (46%): Workers with minimal engagement in cultural activities—neither giving nor receiving significant recognition or feedback.

It's the Unsung Heroes who represent the greatest risk. These are often your most experienced, culturally-aligned employees who possess institutional knowledge and genuine care for their colleagues' development. When they burn out or leave, organizations lose far more than a single employee—they lose a cultural cornerstone.

The Business Case for Change

The implications extend far beyond individual well-being. Organizations face four critical risks when cultural labor becomes concentrated:

Burnout and Attrition: Replacing a senior culture carrier can cost 1.5-2x their salary in lost productivity and hiring costs. These employees often hold relationships and institutional knowledge that's impossible to quickly replace.

Narrow Feedback Loops: When promotion and compensation decisions draw from a limited set of evaluators, bias becomes inevitable. The same voices influence multiple advancement decisions, potentially perpetuating existing inequities.

Engagement Drift: When 46% of employees minimally participate in cultural activities, organizations risk creating a passive workforce where engagement becomes someone else's responsibility.

DEIB Challenges: Over-burdened mentors from underrepresented groups face additional strain, potentially exacerbating equity gaps when they're asked to carry both performance expectations and cultural representation duties.

Success Stories

Real-world evidence demonstrates that addressing culture inequality delivers measurable business impact. Southwest Airlines transformed workplace culture through its comprehensive SWAG (Southwest Airlines Gratitude) platform across its 72,000-employee workforce. By consolidating fragmented recognition practices into a unified system in 2013, Southwest achieved employee engagement scores of 4.2 out of 5 with a 75% survey response rate, while 68% of employees report receiving recognition within six months.

IBM's transformation proves the financial impact of systematic recognition distribution. The technology giant consolidated over 100 disparate recognition programs into its unified DayMaker platform, achieving a 134% increase in unique recognition givers within one year. Most remarkably, IBM's integration of Watson Analytics for predictive retention modeling saves $300 million in retention costs while achieving 95% accuracy in identifying flight risks.

Google's data-driven gThanks platform demonstrates how analytics can ensure recognition equity. The company reports 73% of employees finding their jobs meaningful compared to the industry average of 40%, alongside a 34% increase in employee engagement and 30% reduction in turnover rates. Google's innovation lies in using People Analytics to identify under-recognized groups and customize recognition delivery.

Five System-Level Solutions for Leaders

The research points to five concrete interventions that organizations can implement immediately:

1. Audit and Balance Demand: Implement quarterly reports that flag employees exceeding reasonable feedback requests or recognition activity. Use automated routing to redistribute new requests to under-engaged peers, ensuring load distribution rather than defaulting to usual suspects.

2. Make Invisible Work Visible: Create dashboards showing giver/receiver ratios so managers can intervene before fatigue sets in. Institute monthly recognition for Unsung Heroes, making their contributions as visible as project deliverables.

3. Enforce Guardrails: Establish caps on feedback requests per person per month. Without limits, the inequality curve steepens dramatically, as the research demonstrates.

4. Reward Relational Effort: Embed cultural contribution into performance scorecards with the same weight as technical deliverables. Offer points, bonuses, or promotion criteria tied to recognition and feedback activity, but ensure the rewards flow to givers, not just receivers.

5. Upskill the Silent Majority: Provide training on giving effective, concise feedback to reduce the burden on expert contributors while improving the overall quality of peer input across the organization.

The Path Forward

The research reveals a fundamental truth about modern workplaces: we've systematized everything except the human connections that make organizations thrive. We measure revenue per employee, customer satisfaction scores, and time to hire, but we've left cultural contribution—the very foundation of engagement and retention—to chance.

Culture isn't a nice-to-have that happens organically—it's work, and like all work, it needs to be distributed fairly, measured consistently, and rewarded appropriately.

For Sarah and countless others carrying the invisible burden of workplace culture, this research offers both validation and hope. The problem is real, measurable, and most importantly, solvable.

The question isn't whether your organization has culture carriers shouldering disproportionate loads—the data suggests it almost certainly does. The question is what you'll do about it before you lose them.

In the words of one contributor: "I don't mind being the person people come to for help. I just want to know that someone notices, and that it counts for something."

It's time to make sure it does.

This research was conducted by Happily.ai using data from 23,301 employees from January 2024 to June 2025.