Jo Henderson – What is the role of the people team when building a company culture?

Beginning the discussion by outlining her HR career, Jo described her time working at two of the Big Four accounting firms and gave us an insight into their company values. From her experience, Jo highlighted just how similar these values are to one another across the larger firms, with the words “integrity”, “respect”, and “relationships” found within almost all of the Big Four’s values. Jo explained that whilst the firms at which she worked felt very different, both had essentially the exact same set of values, sending a clear message that values can become outdated and lack impact unless the employees truly understand what they mean in practice.

Jo and the People team at Clear Channel decided to carry out a survey to understand how their employees viewed the firm’s culture and if there was anything they felt could be improved. Following both negative and positive feedback, Jo and the team set out to understand what this meant about how colleagues truly viewed Clear Channel’s culture and how their findings could be used to their advantage. After careful analysis, the survey showed that what is important about culture is unique to each individual employee, whether that be psychological safety, a sense of belonging, health and wellbeing, or development opportunities.

We then considered the question, “who has the biggest impact on company culture?”. Is it the People team? Is it the leadership team? Or is it the culture amongst colleagues that has the biggest impact? We understood that there was no denying that, collectively, all of these parties have a big impact on a company’s culture. Line managers can influence the behaviour of their teams, the leadership team clearly have a large influence, but all colleagues who experience the day-to-day culture of a company will relay and implement the company’s values, cultivating and adding to a culture.

So, what is the role of the People team when building a company culture? Jo left us with the following three points she considers the most important for the People team when building a company culture:

• Remove distractions: Call out bad behaviour and try to make sure all colleagues are on the same page.
• Build the foundations: You can’t create change overnight. Do your research into the business and the people who work there to create development opportunities, focus on the strengths of the company, and build on those.
• Go where the energy is: Follow momentum, understand what colleagues are enthusiastic about, and run with that. Small changes make a big difference. If you spend too much time building a strategy, it will be out of date by the time you publish it.

A big thank you to Jo for taking the time to share her perspective and insight – please get in touch if you would like to hear more about our next OP Academy events!