HR to serve the Culture Cake?

Culture? That´s an HR topic!?

Did you ever hear this kind of statement?

“The culture stuff is about HR to take care, we are responsible for making business or serving customer and clients?”

Is there any expectation that a certain point in time someone from HR is entering the room with a big “culture cake” and everyone gets a piece and afterwards it´s done?

Or is it about better to wait for consultants to tell us what to do from their experience?

Actually I am lucky enough to have many colleagues, who would already at this point disagree, because they strongly believe it´s their responsibility and they take concrete action. And still I have sometimes heard this statement and I also realize sometimes that some people still believe culture is an HR topic.

But what is culture?

My personal reflection and understanding is by now: When talking about "Culture" it´s the summary and the description of observable behavior of all individuals and teams.

So when people say, we have a collaboration culture, this is because people see themselves or others collaborating every day and they like it and so they conclude this positively.

Also at the same time, we often use the bold word of “company culture”, but is there a real company culture overall? Or is it rather, that every interaction, every team, every function have their own “culture”? I believe yes, it´s exactly like that and company culture is therefore the aggregation of all of those interactions and behaviors.

So if I am right, is culture really an HR topic?

Yes, it is, because to my personal opinion HR can and should facilitate discussions with employees and leaders and “the business” on which kind of behaviors are required to be successful when driving innovation, foster digital transformation and sustainability, serving customers, clients and patients.

While our vision at Bayer is “Health for all – Hunger for none” – the next step is not only to figure out our business strategy, but also talk and exchange about how we want to achieve it. And this is where our LIFE 2.0 values become important.

Like our CEO Werner Baumann is writing in his post: “With a world in motion and the ambiguities that lie ahead, we all need orientation. For many years, we have anchored our company culture in four core values that guide us in our daily work and our interactions with stakeholders. As of today, we underpin those values with specific attributes that reflect this ever changing world. … In times like these, we all need orientation. The more the ambiguity and uncertainty we have to deal with, the more important it becomes that we share a clear set of values to define our common ground. At Bayer, our compass is not centered around the four cardinal directions, but our four LIFE values. LIFE stands for Leadership, Integrity, Flexibility and Efficiency. “

And here you can see the behaviors described, where we are confident, that those are exactly the right ones, that will make our company and us successful moving towards make our vision reality.

Bringing it together

So I personally see this kind of work as a responsibility of HR to facilitate not only this discussion, but also to help leaders and employees to engage with those, might it be designing intro sessions, interventions, reflection sessions and facilitating meaningful discussions with the teams and individual people. And I am proud that our HR organization has exactly done this in close partnership across #HRSolutions #HRBP and HRInnovation

And this is the moment, where everyone becomes accountable!

Employees, teams and leaders are invited to reflect on current behavior and also on how to change.

It´s not meant as forcing people to change, rather the invitation to reflect and decide what they think LIFE2.0 will mean for them. So if, this is all true and those behaviors are defining our culture, then I would again ask the question:

Culture? Is that´s really an HR topic?

And my personal conclusion is: No.

It´s about all of us, it´s about all of our teams, and it´s a core leadership responsibility to lead this, provide space and time and to drive it based on frequent reflection and feedback.

We are all responsible for our culture and there is no way to delegate it (to HR or anyone else), because it´s the core of how all of us are doing business and serving customers, clients and patients every day.

And this also means, we need to make this a priority and take the specific time to enable the interaction within the teams to make the next steps.

I am so thankful that so many leaders and teams already made that a priority and that people actively share on how they have approached it and what they learned and reflected using multiple channels.

And if at a certain time, someone from HR brings (or even jumps out of) a cake, this is rather to celebrate together how Life2.0 really made a difference.