You don't say anything about your company or your role in it. Company "culture" is one of those immeasurable wishy-washy borderline woo-woo things that either gets fetishized and obsessed about or completely ignored. The best companies are the ones where the culture is set from the top and manages to seep downward into every aspect of the organization. So if you're not the owner / CEO / somewhere in a leadership role, and you think there's a problem, you're probably not in a place to make it better.
As for specifically improving the way you work, I've been in this exact problem before. A company I worked for knew that our software was lacking documentation, that we didn't have good processes in place for bringing new developers up to speed, and that some of our devops systems were really lacking. Leadership talked for 3 years about the existence of these problems. We discussed them in team meetings. Everyone knew they existed, but because there was always other work taking precedence nothing ever changed and what was broken remained broken.
If you want to make your company better and improve the way you work, start by allocating time to make your company better and improve the way you work. Whether that's an hour a day, a 2 day period every month, or a week every quarter, dedicate time specifically for internal improvements. Get the whole company involved. Mandate that other work doesn't get scheduled and take precedence, and that meetings not related to internal improvements don't interfere.
Once people see that you value internal improvements, and they see how much value those improvements can bring they'll likely be more willing to take ownership of them and invest in them as part of their routine.
Thanks for taking the time to reply in such detail. I've recently proposed that we give blocks of time for working on issues raised internally (mostly improvements to our company documentation etc.) but have seen very little interest and even push back as there are other priorities, just as your describe.
With the little time we have for this work we've already achieved a lot but perhaps mostly on low hanging fruit. Many of the more substantial changes remain. People acknowledge the improvements it sadly doesn't seem to have driven any more engagement...
Sometimes you can't. Many folks do not actually care what they do for work. It's a paycheck. To give you a better answer: documentation. The biggest headache people can have onboarding is not knowing where to access simple information or how to do their job properly.
I guess my worry is more that people are very invested in their technical work, and when prompted are aware of the problems in the company culture - but just seem less interested in being part of the solution.
As for specifically improving the way you work, I've been in this exact problem before. A company I worked for knew that our software was lacking documentation, that we didn't have good processes in place for bringing new developers up to speed, and that some of our devops systems were really lacking. Leadership talked for 3 years about the existence of these problems. We discussed them in team meetings. Everyone knew they existed, but because there was always other work taking precedence nothing ever changed and what was broken remained broken.
If you want to make your company better and improve the way you work, start by allocating time to make your company better and improve the way you work. Whether that's an hour a day, a 2 day period every month, or a week every quarter, dedicate time specifically for internal improvements. Get the whole company involved. Mandate that other work doesn't get scheduled and take precedence, and that meetings not related to internal improvements don't interfere.
Once people see that you value internal improvements, and they see how much value those improvements can bring they'll likely be more willing to take ownership of them and invest in them as part of their routine.