“How do you Change Corporate Culture?” is a recent question asked in a LinkedIn online discussion group that I participate in from time to time with Executives and Leaders from around the world.  On average a good post in this group gets between 3 to 5 comments. So when I saw that a particular topic had over 30 comments, I took a deeper look at the discussion thread about Corporate Culture’s and found some interesting comments and themes posted by these leaders:

• Culture is created and supported by the leaders
• Culture is based on behaviors in an organization not words or marketing efforts
• It could be both a positive and a negative for an organization, but always has an impact
• It doesn’t change easily and is built over time
• Corporate culture is seen as “how work gets done” in an organization
• Finally and most interesting, to me, was a lack of clarity around the role and impact of training, HR, and process improvement efforts in changing culture.
  

Why does changing Corporate Culture seem to grab so much attention?

Two corporate cultures that will soon be seeing some changes due to Merger & Acquisition (M&A) activity in the last few weeks, will be HP and Palm. HP, ranked number 10 this year in fortune 500 has purchased Palm Inc, the struggling mobile phone company known for its innovative mobile WebOS platform. Most analysts felt that the HP purchase of Palm was a good move for both organizations. They spoke of the positive aspects of the WebOS platform, the need for HP to compete in a market dominated by Apple and Blackberry, and more importantly the opportunity for HP to pick up a more innovative and developer friendly culture. Over the next few month’s analysts, application developers, users, and employees for Palm and HP will be watching to see how Palm is integrated into HP’s business plans and very distinct culture. Mark Hurd, HP’s CEO, has created a very strong culture over the last few years, which is based on collaborative leaders working in a very focused and efficient environment.  Palm on the other hand not surprisingly has a culture that has been described as “entrepreneurial, engineer based, and techie-geek friendly”. If the analysts are on target, part of what HP needed from this purchase is to acquire more innovation and cutting edge mobile technology. If this merger and acquisition is poorly handled, they could quickly loose the most important part of this purchase, the culture and talent of Palm.

Online comments from the app developers and users summed this up nicely in comments such as:  

”What does worry me is the affect of such a big corporate culture on somebody as geared towards openness as Palm.”

“As with any acquisition, though, the medium- and long-term fate of Palm’s culture and people is unclear. For now, at least, HP seems interested in maintaining Palm’s brand identity and separate status as a business unit, but some redundant jobs (e.g. HR, perhaps marketing, finance, others) will almost certainly be at risk.”

Will HR play a role in this effort? More importantly for us – what should be the role of HR in this critical organizational element? 

If HR is truly the steward of an organizations talent strategy and leadership approach within an organization, what is their role in helping to create, support, and enable a positive corporate culture or merging two distinctly different cultures? If training, process improvement, and HR are seen as possibly having little impact on organizational cultures – what is our role?

When I’ve spoken with HR Leaders and HR Business partners from companies such as IBM, Cisco, Lockheed Martin, or Rogers Communications – companies that are no strangers to major cultural changes and M&A’s - one thing always stands out; how critical they feel their role is as advisors and coaches. This role of coaching and advising the company’s business leadership is critical for many reasons. Most organizations ask their HR business partner roles to do a mixture of both tactical and strategic work. This practice seems reasonable as these roles are often closer to the tactical work and HR data. Our most recent research on High Impact HR Organizations clearly found that organizations with HR business partners who focused solely on strategic efforts and business coaching had both greater business impact and more effective HR functions. What is even more surprising, is that HR functions with no HR business partner roles, were actually better off than organizations which have HR Business partner roles that included a great deal of administrative work.
 

The true value of an HR business partner role seems to be in their abilities as a coach, mentor, business advisor, and strategist. Their role in many cases is to help the business understand where the people risks and opportunities lie within their business decisions.

A great comment from the LinkedIn discussion that inspired this topic says it best:

Director from ComCast,
“First and foremost, an identified focus of cultural change needs to be a wakeup call to those at the top that they need to change. If the top layer cannot look in the mirror and recognize what they need to change, all of the incentive programs in the world will not work.”

Leadership sets the tone and direction of a corporate culture, but HR could be the mirror for our leaders and help them see both the positive and negative elements of their decisions and behaviors.

Are you currently going through a large corporate culture shift? Do you have examples of how your HR function has helped support both the change and development of a corporate culture? Please feel free to contact me at Stacey.Harris@Berisin.com. I’d love to hear your stories and learn more about your efforts.