HR is undergoing a reinvention and company culture sits at the heart of everything for people leaders, whether dealing with AI adoption, new strategic direction or accelerated organizational growth.

At UNLEASH World this year, there was no shortage of HR leaders talking passionately about why culture is so critical to their organizations during periods of change and what they are doing to ensure culture and strategy are harmoniously aligned in the future of work.

Opening the HR Reinvention sessions on Day Two, stream host and workplace culture expert Bruce Daisley highlighted the need to bring “joy back to our cultures.”

“It’s pretty evident that where we are in work right now, there’s a lot changing,” he explained.

“People in the workplace are becoming less extroverted. There’s a decline in people feeling like they’re conscientious for their jobs. We’ve got to take that into account.”

Daisley highlighted three key factors that go into “creating really strong, joyful, motivating cultures” – autonomy, identity and community.

Each of these three levers was present among various HR leaders on stage at UNLEASH World, feeding into how organizations across different markets and regions are approaching the issue of culture in a changing workplace environment.

Daisley added that AI is causing work to become more fragmented and that people leaders need to be cognizant of this impact as the technology accelerates within the workplace.

“The thing we should be certain of is that the differentiator for organizations going forward is going to be that layer of culture,” he cautioned delegates.

Leading from the top on culture and values at Lloyds Banking Group, IKEA and McDonalds

On the Main Stage, three HR leaders discussed how culture is both a superpower and a strategic imperative for their organizations and people, moderated by Lighthouse Research & Advisory’s Chief Strategy Officer, George Rogers.

Emilee DeMartino, SVP, Chief People Officer for International Operated Markets at McDonald’s, highlighted how the values of the organization “unite our workforce” at scale.

The fast food giant employs more than 2.2 million people worldwide through its franchise business model, so “having all of those groups operate from a common core set of values is incredibly important,” DeMartino explained.

Leadership then is a crucial component for instilling and safeguarding the company’s culture: “It takes courage to lead and to uphold those values. Modelling those values is 100% a key expectation.”

DeMartino added that just as McDonald’s products aim for consistency – “when you get a Big Mac in France, it should taste like a Big Mac in the UK, or Australia, or the US” – so too are leaders tasked with maintaining the same people practices regardless of location.

“We put in place a set of global people standards, ensuring that we had consistency in every one of our restaurants around the world and our corporate offices when it comes to harassment, discrimination, retaliation, workplace safety, listening and taking action on feedback from employees,” she explained.

For Alejandra Piñol, Global Deputy CHRO at Ingka Group, the parent company of Swedish retailer IKEA, leadership is defined by the company’s culture and values, the principles of which were established “more than 80 years ago by our founder.”

“At IKEA, we believe everyone is a leader. Everyone has the capacity to lead, everyone has the autonomy to lead, and everyone has the strong belief to lead. And this leadership idea, it’s very valuable. It’s very inclusive, and it’s for all,” Piñol said.

While the cultural values of IKEA were set eight decades ago by founder Ingvar Kamprad, Piñol explained they have also evolved over time but “the essence is the same, they are the compass for everything we do.”

We have values in the leadership idea as the core. We also have values in the performance management that we assess. Values have a higher weight than the goals.” 

Sharon Doherty, Chief People and Places Officer at Lloyds Banking Group, was fierce in her agreement with the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

She detailed that much of the work at Lloyds is focused on rebooting “a legacy bank and making it a big fintech”, which is “easy to say and hard to do.”

“Talking about culture is one thing, but how do you really operationalize the change of a culture in an organization, which I think is probably what most of us are doing,” she explained.

“We use a McKinsey model for systems, behaviors, symbols and storytelling. So it is a full end-to-end system.”

During her session on Day Three, Lloyd’s Doherty returned to discuss the “secrets” to rebooting companies, having done so at Vodafone, Finastra and now at the UK banking group.  

She noted that HR leaders need to be the “Vibe King or Queen” of how an organization feels, while also having the capability to have the tough conversations, and avoid getting hung up on elements that are “too hard to change.”  

At the same time, culture isn’t a passive fixture within an organization; it’s a living, evolving element that cannot be left to its own devices, especially in times of change.

While speaking with UNLEASH, Paddy Hull, Head of Talent, Leadership, and Culture at The Heineken Company, likened culture to a spider’s web, in that “you don’t know it’s there until you walk into it.”

You can read the full, exclusive interview with Hull here.

Meanwhile, two HR leaders provided in-depth case studies during UNLEASH World into how their respective organizations are proactively enshrining culture into business practices and the workforce during periods of reinvention.

Protecting culture as growth causes complexity at Hermès

Sharon Macbeath, Group Human Resources Director at French high-end retailer Hermès, detailed how the luxury fashion house experienced a period of growth following the Covid-19 pandemic.

Adding 10,000 new staff in the past five years, almost doubling total headcount, meant facing the dilemma of how to protect company culture at such scale.

She explained to delegates that the challenge for Hermès was to protect its humanistic culture “of creation, craftsmanship and mastery” while continuing to “cultivate that joy of belonging and being part of something” for employees.

The feeling of belonging at scale was a particular challenge, she detailed, and while leadership at the very top of the brand are tasked with embodying the cultural principles at the heart of its business model, the fear of dilution was real.

“As you grow, you also introduce new management layers, so how do you make sure these people coming into the organization are behaving and managing in a way that’s consistent with an aspiration to humanistic management?” MacBeath asked.

These two challenges are not separate challenges; they’re inextricably linked. You can only keep culture alive through management, and you can only build management in a way that’s consistent with culture if you do it in the context of the culture.”

The answer lay with charging senior managers with more than a dozen years with the organization to develop the intermediate, middle-management layers in protecting and passing on cultural principles.

To do so, MacBeath explained that Hermès’ culture was defined into four distinct “territories” – Craftsmanship, Benevolence, Transmission, and Beauty – “as a starting point for managers to think about humanistic management.”

But she also highlighted “between the principles and the practice, there’s always a gap” meaning managers need space to “to think about the principles of the organization, to think about how they’re going to translate that in their own way, in an autonomous fashion.”

A simple vehicle was needed to convey these principles and MacBeath said the company used cards with “a few quotes that come from people in the organization, that speak to what culture is for them” for managers to use to start conversations.

MacBeath added that sometimes “conversation requires some facilitation”, so Hermès has started by training a set of volunteers in the organization “willing to become facilitators for these conversations about culture.”

It was also important that this not be viewed as a “global rollout” in the same manner as a technology implementation, but rather as “a movement”.

So far, Hermès has “engaged literally thousands of intermediate managers in this conversation in a whole range of situations,” MacBeath detailed. 

“We really experience how powerful something, actually, quite simple can be to sharing practices.”  

But beyond that, people have a feeling of being heard and being seen. We’ve built a community that supports each other. It’s become a learning community,” she concluded.

Leveraging culture and trust to embrace AI at Sanofi

Raj Verma, Chief Culture, Inclusion and Employee Experience Officer at pharmaceutical heavyweight Sanofi, told attendees he was “pretty skeptical” about AI “not because of the technology, but because of the culture.”

“I was asking myself, is the pharma industry ready for AI?”

Sanofi, already one of the largest pharma organizations globally, has ambitions to be the first biopharmaceutical “using AI at scale.”

However, Verma also acknowledged “we cannot do it without the people, and we cannot do it if we don’t build psychological safety, leadership and trust.”

When considering how to introduce AI into workflows and processes at Sanofi, Verma detailed that part of the challenge was nurturing an attitude of curiosity, to be able to ask questions and voice opinions without fear of reprisal.

“One of the things we’ve been doing at Sanofi is to make sure that we’re co-creating with people. So we have built an accelerator where we allow people to experiment, ask the questions that you wouldn’t ordinarily ask in your day job,” he said.

We’ve given them the time to build this out. That’s really important; that technology can’t be a black box.”

The accelerator has more than 200 employees from 20 countries working on different projects across different parts of the business, similarly to a startup model that allows Sanofi to “scale and test, and get out there super fast”, Verma said.

“We can have the best algorithms and the best coding, but if people don’t trust the AI, it will never stick.”

One of the most notable results of Sanofi’s approach to leveraging its culture to embrace AI is the development of its internal GPT, Concierge.

Since its launch, more than 80% of Sanofi’s 86,000 employees have used Concierge, resulting in over 5 million conversations.

Verma said the tool was built in collaboration with staff “who we asked to ask the questions that nobody else was asking, which is important, because they weren’t just tech enthusiasts.”

“Here’s the key part I really want to amplify with what we did – it’s about transparency of Concierge’s capabilities,” he underlined.

“It is not perfect, and it’s not a magical solution. It augments human intelligence, it doesn’t replace it, and that’s a really important part of this – it’s not the answer to every problem. It’s a big part of enabling you to figure out the challenges you have.”

Verma also highlighted recognition as a core element to Sanofi’s culture and AI adoption alike, pointing out that “recognition is the fuel of trust.”

Adding a proprietary recognition platform called Bravo, again based on the “core values of Sanofi” was a “huge enabler for accelerating AI adoption”, he explained, which allowed the organization to “recognize employees who are really going beyond.”

“In the age of AI and accelerated change, our values are always right at the core of what we’re doing. People need to see the big picture,” Verma concluded.

I always use this notion that culture is not just a vibe, it’s a verb. If you want your culture to stick, you have to do things to amplify it, because if you do nothing, you’ll still have a culture, but probably not the one that you want.”