Sliced Cheese: 6/15

The Big Cheese has been hard to pin down of late. But recently he’s left his cave in the Loire Valley to speak out on the importance of culture and HR’s role in developing it.

Post recession, Cheese thinks culture has never been so important, nor been treated as such by business. And what’s more, HR is being seen as the key to fostering and bringing clarity to company culture. Examining culture, Cheese says:

Where does culture start? At the top.

The problem is that leaders are neither trained nor well-equipped to approach culture. As Cheese says:

One of the big myths of corporate culture is that management understands what their culture is. Senior directors typically talk about what they want culture to be and what they think it should be rather than understanding what the culture they’ve created is actually like.

So it is HR’s role to step up and provide the information and training that senior management needs to enhance company culture. In doing so, the bottom line improves as does the credibility and value of HR.

He is wary, though, of HR falling back on rule-making and policy in attempting to forcibly mould culture along certain lines.

When you make rules you disassociate people from their own actions. We have created a parent/child relationship. I’m not saying abandon all the rules, but try having less prescriptive rules in some parts of the organisation.

Instead, HR should always be looking to professionalise their function. Rather than waving a magic rule wand, the emphasis for HR “needs to be on collecting, analysing and, crucially, acting on employee data, such as levels of engagement, rates of stress and absenteeism, and on heeding feedback from staff.”

Analysing data objectively will allow HR to accurately pin down cultural strengths and weaknesses, rather than simply pointing to a foosball table and saying “We love fun and having a good time!”.

Vintage advice from the Cheese, we think. We recommend pairing with a Beaujolais Cru.

About the author

Jerome Langford

Jerome is a graduate in Philosophy from St Andrews, who alternately spends time writing about HR and staring wistfully out of windows, thinking about life’s bigger questions: Why are we here? How much lunch is too much lunch? What do you mean exactly by ‘final warning’?