Happy At Work?

For good or bad, every workplace has a culture; and how you create, nurture and develop that culture can be critical to your company’s success. But is enough value being placed on the importance of getting that culture right? And what role does HR need to play in building it?

“Doing more with less resources makes it imperative that HR be in sync with the business”

During the credit crunch, it was all too easy for employers to forget about motivating their staff in the scramble to cut costs. Of course, the smart firms recognized that their people were key to surviving the recession and emerging on the other side as a stronger and more effective organization; but those that neglected to pay attention to their most valuable resource were guilty of making a grave error of judgment. "The economy will always bounce back, but there's absolutely no point in coming through the other side with a workforce that feels undervalued and frustrated," explains Kingston University's Professor Katie Truss. "Organizations need to continually invest in their staff."

In fact, the culture of an organization or corporation is more important than many people realize. Ask anyone who's tried to change or shift a well-established ‘way of doing things' in an organization and they'll tell you just how big a force culture can be. However, culture is not stagnant and it can, and does, change over time - corporate mergers, major changes in leadership, and significant market and production changes can all influence a change in an organization's culture.

So how do you create a culture that works? The key is to help employees understand how their work has real value, suggests Mike Emmott, Employee Engagement Adviser at the CIPD. "People who are happy in their work perform better, they ‘talk up' their organization, are more loyal and tend to recommend the organization to others," he says.

And while the economic downturn has taken a toll on businesses worldwide, the tumultuous environment also provides a unique opportunity for HR to demonstrate leadership and creativity. Indeed, the majority of survey respondents agree that when business conditions become unfavorable, senior managers rely on HR more than they do in good economic times. "Doing more with less resources makes it imperative that HR be in sync with the business," says Gilda Stahl, an editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit. "Developing an awareness of the skills of each employee can help HR align these to its business strategy."

It really isn't rocket science. "We've found that helping people connect with their roles is just about common sense principles - providing a good work-life balance, listening to staff, providing people with the time and opportunity to share ideas and, most importantly, recognizing and rewarding them for their contribution to your organization," agrees Truss.

But nonetheless, many companies - particularly those in a turnaround situation or those integrating new business units following a merger or acquisition - fail to recognize the importance of getting the culture right, or struggle to overhaul a culture that's not working. Does this represent a failure in leadership? Can and should different working styles be accommodated? And what role can HR play in facilitating cultural transformation? Over the next few pages, we find out.

Jennifer Weber
SVP and Chief Human Resources Officer for Duke Energy

A strong corporate culture is vital. We already have a strong corporate culture at Duke. We have a real ‘take the hill' culture, so when there's an area that we need to focus on - for instance, because of the economic downturn we've recently had a focus on cost management - this company has a way of knowing how to get things done to realize that end-goal. Safety is big, too. We have a lot of jobs, especially in our nuclear facilities and our fossil plants, which are quite dangerous so we really instill a focus on safety and that's a very important part of our culture. And we also have a very strong culture of community service, and we actively encourage our employees to get involved in charities and community projects of their choice.

Duke is a combination of a number of different acquisitions and mergers over a period of time, which raises challenges with regards to integrating different working cultures. What you've got to do is get to a point where you're clear with expectations: you're giving the employees all the information they need, and you're giving managers and supervisors all the information they need on how to do things the Duke way. What are the things that are distinct? What are the things that have given us a competitive advantage? So we have to make sure that we're teaching the new organization, but that we're also open to learning from them. If there are cultural attributes that are important for them to preserve, then we have to be open to hearing what those are, and maybe even figure out a way that we could have those positive elements influence Duke's culture.

Leadership behaviors and leadership accountability are really important, because the cultural tone is oftentimes set at the top. I think it comes through in the way in which decisions get made, the way in which information gets communicated. Those things really contribute to and help form a corporate culture. As such, HR plays a role in helping advise the CEO and other leaders on culture and promoting a positive work environment, making sure that we are making changes to various aspects of the way we handle employee programs that it is consistent with where we are trying to go as an organization. So I would say that we play more of an advisory role; it's really the CEO's responsibility to make sure that we're disseminating the cultural attributes that are consistent with the kind of company he's trying to create.

Misty Reich
Vice President of Global Talent Management for Yum Brands Inc.

In times like this, when companies might be tightening the belt around pay, around rewards and benefits or even training, you would hope that you have a culture that's ‘sticky' enough - that makes people want to stay and has them engaged. When you think about the experience of having a job and what that feels like - which is essentially what culture is all about - it impacts your performance day-to-day, it impacts whether you want to stay there, it impacts how you feel about the company and whether you want to invite other people to come work there. We like to talk about people falling in love with the company, and it takes a special culture for people to stick with it when times get tough.

We have a very intentionally built culture. When we spun out of PepsiCo, our Chairman David Novak spent eight or nine months meeting with what he thought were the best companies and took bits of the culture from each one of them to build our own. So our culture is defined. We have what we call the ‘How we win together' principles, and recognition is one of them, belief in all people is another, being customer maniacs is a third. In fact, our employees tell us that recognition is one of the highlights of our culture. We believe that every human, no matter what country you live in or how senior you've become in your work career, likes to be recognized. Support and accountability are also really important for us. We believe in peoples' capabilities and we trust in their positive intentions and their ability to get things done.

My role is really championing the culture and keeping it alive. I'm not defining it, I'm not adapting it; I've got a great culture that's really already been cascaded effectively throughout the business, and I'm just the keeper of that culture. My top three priorities, and the things that I want my team to be known for as an HR team, are great recruitment, great people development, and building a culture that makes people want to come to work for KFC and stay. And that's the piece of the culture that I'm focused on. First and foremost you have to be a business leader and understand what the business is trying to accomplish. What is the core strategy? And only from that point can you start talking about how the people resources in the organization can help drive towards that.

Thomas Stewart
Chief Knowledge Officer at Booz & Company

Culture is extraordinarily important in these tough times, for a number of reasons. First of all, you've got to find ways to keep people engaged, even when they're anxious. What is a corporate culture? Essentially it is a set of ways in which we work together, a set of ways in which we engage with one another in order to achieve our organizational goals. And a strong culture is going to be one where we relate to one another in a supportive way; it's going to give you the strong cultural support of a peer group.

The second thing is that the cultures that often work best are those that are grounded in the kind of work you do. So you don't necessarily want to get all touchy-feely when you're in a very difficult, dirty working environment, or get all tough and macho when you're in a softer, consultative environment; those attributes are not necessarily how you want to define your working culture. Your ethos should connect with what you do for customers. So I think that in a tough time a strong culture reinforces not only the value proposition of why you're here, but also the value proposition of what you're doing for your customers, however few they may be.

At Booz & Company, we're currently going through an investigation of, revitalization of, affirmation of and in some cases tweaking of our corporate culture. So one thing that is very key to our corporate culture is teamwork. It's the nature of the client service business. So what are the things that we do to make teaming happen, that make teaming successful, or that can inhibit teaming from happening? A certain degree of self-knowledge regarding how your culture operates - and how it connects to the work you do - is essential.

The other thing that is important is how to create the circumstances in which we as an organization can learn from each other and draw on our collective knowledge. I should at all times be adding what I learn to our common knowledge pool, and in return I should be able to draw on that common pool to help solve the business challenges I face on a daily basis. Again, it is the cultural environment that allows such knowledge to be shared and communicated effectively within a company or organization. And building that culture is key to any firm's success, in good times and in bad.

Matt Stolper
Chief Human Resources Officer at Tishman Realty & Construction Co.

The real key to a successful culture is that it's not about policies, it's about people. I think that Tishman - right from the time it was a small company - has always given people the opportunity to express themselves professionally and personally, and I think that's what people want. People want the opportunity to show who they are and what they know, with the right amount of structure to ensure that they know they're a part of the company, but giving them the opportunities they need to show what they can contribute.

And people can contribute a lot. Our senior workforce has an average tenure of 20-plus years, and one of the most important things we do is to get the people who do have tenure with Tishman - those people who understand its culture intuitively, and understand instinctively the kind of person that will make it in this environment and those that won't - involved in the hiring process. By getting the people who really understand the culture to participate in that hiring decision, we can perpetuate that culture and continue to make it work.

Of course, the challenge we face as we move forward is that just because something has worked well in the past, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work that way in the future. Part of the reason for this is that things - technologies, relationships, ways of working - change, and we must be responsive to that. The other is that a lot of the folks who have made decisions collectively and individually for us are at some point going to leave the organization; the challenge then becomes how to ‘download' that knowledge, experience and intuition and make it available to other people in the organization so that we can continue to make the right decisions.

Good, professional people are focused on their careers, on making a difference, and leaving a legacy of the work that they've done. That's a universal truism for people, and we operate on that basis. So it gets built into every interaction that happens every day, it gets built into every decision we make strategically from a short, mid or long-term perspective, and it works. I think having the right culture is about giving the organization confidence that it can take on risk, can take on a challenging project and can do it with a sense of conviction because it knows it has the organizational and leadership capabilities to marshal and harness those resources effectively to make the project a success.