LEADERS
DIGEST
The
Six Pillars
of Vibrant Workplace Culture BY COLIN D ELLIS
There’s never been a better time to be in HR. For the first time, employee experience has been brought to the fore and C-suite members are talking about the importance of so many cultural elements. Diversity and inclusion, health and wellbeing, flexibility, workspace design, enhanced collaboration and innovation. However, HR cannot be passive in its approach to this transformation. For too long they’ve taken a back seat and not gone into bat for money and time to develop culture and watched on as demanding chief information (and later digital) officers have secured millions for technology enhancements, all of which require – ironically – culture change.
6
Issue 36 I February 2020
The rise of agile is the latest quick-fix approach to cultural evolution and will fail as so many fads have failed before as the foundational elements of culture aren’t changed to make way for greater flexibility of delivery.
The importance of culture Culture pervades through everything that’s done on a dayto-day basis, from the behaviour of senior leaders in large global organisations to the way that a sports team trains for a game at the weekend. It dictates where people sit in a classroom, how meetings are run in an office, how decisions are made on a ship, how construction projects are delivered, how orchestras play together and how clothes are marketed online. And it belongs to everyone.
