Marina Gainova
People & Culture Director, Coca-Cola HBC
Cultures that last in the long-term are those that are created and embodied by employees at every level.
Culture is the common set of values, beliefs and behaviours that bind us together as an organisation. A strong organisational culture provides employees with common purpose. Operating hand in hand with employee engagement, an engaged workforce living and breathing organisational cultural values sets the tone for a highly performing and customer centric organisation.
We need to be mindful where responsibility for culture sits. It doesn’t belong to HR, or to the senior leadership team, it belongs to each and every employee.
Bringing the people with you
To truly demonstrate a common set of values, beliefs and behaviours, organisations need to bring all employees with them. Our vision, within Coca-Cola HBC Ireland and Northern Ireland is to make us a high performing team and a customer centric business.
To identify the values that support this vision we held employee focus groups across all levels and arrived at six Culture Principles to define how we work. They are: dream big, be obsessively curious, be output driven, run it like you own it, trust the team and strive for simplicity.
We need to be mindful where responsibility for culture sits. It doesn’t belong to HR, or to the senior leadership team, it belongs to each and every employee.
Culture champions
To empower employees and ensure they owned the Culture Principles, we ran Culture Lab workshops where employees got together in line manager and team groups. The groups would then select two Culture Principles that most resonated with them to improve upon within their own teams throughout the year.
Appointing cross functional culture champions who represent all levels of the business and act as change agents, capturing the reality of organisational culture on the ground, role modelling the Culture Principles and communicating both up and down the organisation.
Keeping the culture alive
Weaving cultural narratives into everyday language is important to ensure that an organisation remains on track and that culture is an everyday reality.
Measuring culture reality and satisfaction through engagement surveys, entry and exit interviews also gives an overview of what’s working and what’s not working. Recognising and rewarding positive behaviours, processes and practices is critical. Negatives should be addressed in a timely manner to ensure all teams are working in a supportive, trusting environment rowing together in the one direction.
Picture of success
Success is realised when every employee knows, understands and is aware of the part they play in role modelling the Culture Principles which results in a highly performing, customer centric organisation. It’s not only knowing what we need to do to embody our principles but going a step further and living them every day.