How to make Corporate Culture more tangible than just nice words on a wall?

I used to struggle with the responsibility of fostering corporate culture, which is typically associated with HR roles.

First, it always seemed very intangible to me. What exactly is corporate culture? Of course, I could find the definition on Google. Let's take the Cambridge dictionary's definition as an example: ‘The beliefs and ideas that a company has and the way in which they affect how it does business and how its employees behave.’?

Does that really help anyone here?

Second, I’ve mostly heard about corporate culture in terms of ‘Yeah we have a great culture, we do regular afterworks’. Well, if it’s just about that, I guess the Covid lockdown was a bit complicated for your company culture then… Or ‘Yeah we have a great culture, we have defined our company values’. Well, if it’s just about that, why is it such a big deal then??

Third, philosophically speaking, I don’t get why the culture should be the responsibility of one person (or one team if you’re lucky enough to have a team).?

For me, culture is the responsibility of the entire organization. Every employee should contribute to it. Isn’t that precisely what a company culture is supposed to do if I get back to the definition above? It should be the sum of what everyone brings to the table. That’s actually why I’m frequently asking candidates ‘What are you currently doing to contribute to the culture of your company?’?

Therefore I’ve sometimes been puzzled about the job titles in the HR environment such as ‘Culture Manager’ (and with the entire thing about fancy job titles flourishing every year in our beloved start-up nation environment…)

So basically, at the very beginning, it looked like my role in terms of culture was about:

• Picking nebulous words and putting them together to sound meaningful and inspiring and blinging them out with a nice design so you can hang them on the wall and claim ‘we have corporate values’.
• Organizing after-work drinks and making sure there is enough alcohol available so everyone gets drunk enough to believe they had a great party.

At this point, you might have noticed I’m not a visionary-creative type of person. It’s true, I’m more pragmatic and down-to-earth? (and I tend to be sometimes a bit sarcastic too).?

But wait a minute before sending me directly to the poor-HR-professional-who-did-not-get-the-strategic-importance-of-culture box, please. It’s just that it took me some time to understand what is it really about, its importance, and how I can contribute - yes contribute, not owning it because I did not change my mind on this - to the corporate culture of a company.?

What made me change my mind about my company culture HR responsibilities??

Individual Expectations

It started with individual concerns.

Facing numerous candidates asking me what our company culture and values were,? or employees referring to this topic too, I had to acknowledge the fact that I couldn’t apply the famous ostrich technique with this any longer. Yes, not everyone has the same view as me (it’s funny how I can still be frequently surprised by this timeless truth) on this culture thing. So I had to review my position if I wanted to deliver properly in my HR role.?

Basically, here, it was more about a constraint than a true belief which led me to consider this topic a bit more. But I guess I had to start somewhere.

Collective Dimension

What really made me change my mind is the collective dimension of culture.

As a company, and here I mean as a group of people working together, you need to navigate through A LOT of events. Happy events and harder ones. We can all remember the unprecedented lockdown where almost all companies suddenly switched to full-remote while most of us had mainly oral and informal communication styles. I precisely remember that sentence from my previous manager when all of this started: ‘Now we’ll really see what our company culture is all about. I was struck by this sentence and I think it represents the moment when I truly understood what is Corporate Culture.?

Yes during the lockdown we probably all have seen what our company cultures were really about.? First, because we were unable to exclusively rely on easy things such as company events (offsites, afterworks,...) to build our culture. Second, because we had to face a real challenge collectively and it’s clearly when facing adversity that your true self shines through. Even as a company.?

So what is Corporate Culture about?

On the top of the iceberg, you have:

• Your corporate values (considering they are actually reflecting who you are)
• The team events
• Your company routines and processes.?
• What you write in your handbook

But what matters the most is actually the bottom of the iceberg:?

• What you write in your handbook and is not happening for real but also what you don’t write in your handbook and is happening frequently.?
• What people understand and remember every time your CEO and more generally your leadership team speaks.?
• Every single decision you make (or you don’t make)

For all of this, it’s hard to measure the exact impact on your company culture but it’s still there and actually much more impactuful than the top of the iceberg.?

Therefore I realized that culture is modeled by everything we do, we write and say. But also what we let happen, what we don’t do, don’t write or don’t say.

Then how to make it tangible?

At Wave, it was anyway pretty difficult to hang anything on the wall because as a full-remote company, we don’t have walls. I mean, I have walls at home (and I’m grateful for that). But I rather like to hang ugly-but-cute drawings from my 6 years old niece than Wave’s Corporate Values (sorry Adrien Falcon , but I promise it doesn’t prevent me from thinking about Wave quite frequently).?

So, as an HR, I did a few things to make our culture more tangible and precise. Among other things:

• I formalized Observable Behaviors related to our Core Values .

• For any HR policy I write, I start from general principles guided by our Core Values (as we did for our Compensation & benefits policy for example )

• I spent hours formalizing our Company Playbook to put words on everything (and I still spend a relatively large amount of time updating it frequently).

You might find actually a lot of other examples of what an HR can do to make culture tangible in the workplace. Ask ChatGPT, it will be 10 times faster than randomly browsing the internet.

Is it enough?

But the truth is that you can’t really make it 100% tangible. You can try to explicit it but you’ll never be able to exhaustively grasp what your culture is about. You just can’t formalize the bottom part of the iceberg.

That’s probably why I struggled for so long to really catch this part of my role. Because it’s just not fully tangible. That’s how it is and I just had to accept that. And believe me, it’s hard for the pragmatic person I am.

So the best I can do is to try to make and apply everyday decisions - even the hard ones - by keeping in mind they will have an impact on our company culture. And make sure everyone around me is doing the same. At the end of the day, it's all about the bottom of the iceberg.