Strategic HR Analysing culture
they have to understand it’s a bit of a
nebulous subject… we have to be
prepared to push back a bit. I think it
would be disingenuous and ineffective
if we tried to come up with a number,”
says Rosemary McGinness, chief
people officer at The Weir Group. “I
don’t think with culture you ever get
there, it’s a journey.”
So what should HR present instead?
And how should it go about collecting
this intelligence, if it isn’t already
doing so?
The key is to combine many different
data sets, and make sure they’re
meaningful in your specific context,
says Lowe.
“You have to spend some time saying
‘what’s the combination of metrics that
will give us a feel? And then can we,
when we’re actually out in the company,
continually be testing it?’” he says.
“So employee surveys sure, but I
worry the majority of companies
will repurpose that and say ‘it tells us
about the culture’.”
“It’s probably an amalgam of lots of
things we already measure and maybe a
couple of things we don’t and should,”
muses Natalie Bickford, group HR
director at Merlin Entertainments.
“Certainly things like employee
engagement, retention rates, internal
promotion rates, diversity data,
sickness absence, grievances raised,
whistleblowing… adherence to policy
and policy itself.
“So if for example you say ‘we
want our culture to be about getting
the best people,’ do you have the
flexibility in your organisation that
would enable that?”
She adds: “I think of culture as the
output, and value statements and
behaviours as input. The demand will
come from the board, but it’s the HR
director’s opportunity to make this a
really worthwhile exercise.”
of a company and ensures that its values,
strategy and culture align with that purpose
effective chair and a balance of skills,
backgrounds, experience and knowledge,
stakeholder relationships based on the
“It depends on your performance
management schemes but they often
have quite a lot of good data – you
might have observations around how
individuals are living the values of your
organisation,” says Janet King, director
of HR and corporate services and
deputy chief executive at Frimley
Health NHS Foundation Trust.
She explains that auditing culture is
rising up the agenda in the public
sector too: “There’s always been
governance but that’s definitely gone up
a notch in my world. We did a piece on
cultural maturity and actually it was the
internal auditors that did it. Normally
they’re looking at your books and
numbers. This was the first time they
looked at people and culture.”
“We’re right to focus on culture, but
in my opinion it’s so important that we
need to get beyond the word,” says
Ingham. “It’s become so central now
that the term isa distraction. We need
to start focusing on what’s behind the
culture, what’s creating the culture… It
is everything and if that’s the case let’s
focus on the collective nature of all
those elements, but let’s try to be
cellular about what we’re talking about.”
There are some organisations out
there that are potentially helpful to
partner with to help turn culture into a
more granular endeavour, says Foster
Back. But HR will need to be highly
discerning about which ones to enlist,
she reiterates: “There are some
providers who will be opportunist
around this… There are others like us
who have been around a while. Our
survey see box-out on p21 has existed
since 2005 so it has a track record.”
An anthropological approach
But for Jones there’s no substitute for
HR getting out into the organisation to
observe in a more qualitative way
what’s occurring on the ground and
communicating that back: “How do
anthropologists study culture?
Through what we call participatory
observation. They go and live with the
Trobriand islanders and try and figure
out what’s going on. It should be the
same in organisations.”
“With culture you know it, you feel
it, you can describe it. But you can’t
measure it from reading a report. It’s
like reading a guidebook about Italy
and saying you’ve been there. You have
to go,” agrees Morrisons’ Duducu.
It’s critical that organisations first
The Wates
Principles
Principle one: Purpose
An effective board promotes the purpose
Principle two: Composition
Effective board composition requires an
with individual directors having suffi cient
capacity to make a valuable contribution.
The size of a board should be guided by
the scale and complexity of the company
Principle three: Responsibilities
A board should have a clear understanding
of its accountability and terms of
reference. Its policies and procedures
should support effective decision-making
and independent challenge
Principle four: Opportunity
and risk
Boards should promote the long-term
success of the company by identifying
opportunities to create and preserve
value and establishing oversight for the
identifi cation and mitigation of risks
Principle five: Remuneration
A board should promote executive
remuneration structures aligned to
sustainable long-term success, taking into
account pay and conditions elsewhere in
the company
Principle six: Stakeholders
A board has a responsibility to oversee
meaningful engagement with material
stakeholders, including the workforce,
and have regard to that discussion when
taking decisions. It should foster good
company’s purpose
carefully define the kind of culture
they’re after, reiterates Grant
Thornton’s Jex: “We say start with
20 HR November 2019 hrmagazine.co.uk
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