Culture Connectedness is Crucial for HR Leaders in Driving Culture Change

Organizational culture is top of mind for many HR leaders as they attempt to address evolving employee expectations and constantly changing business conditions. However, many are struggling to achieve a return on investment of their efforts.

We spoke with Cian O Morain, Senior Director, in the Gartner HR practice, at the Gartner ReimagineHR Conference in London to discuss the key actions needed to drive culture change and what leaders can do to ensure culture change sticks once implemented.

Journalists who would like to speak with Cian regarding this topic can contact Mary.Baker@gartner.com or Gerri.Weinberger@gartner.com. Members of the media can reference this material in articles with proper attribution to Gartner.

A: The key to breaking through the noise of all the other changes employees are grappling with and making culture change stick is connection.

Culture connectedness has three components (see Figure 1):

1. Identifying with the culture
2. Caring about the culture
3. Feeling like you belong within the culture

Organizations that focus on culture connectedness can realize several benefits including a two times increase in employees reporting culture change, a 4.5 times increase in high performance and an 11.5 times increase in high engagement. 

A: While CHROs are hyper-focused on the organization’s culture, employees are experiencing a multitude of changes.

Enterprise changes can include restructures, CEO succession, culture change, and software updates, while work changes could be getting a new manager, moving to a new team or a change in role. Due to all these changes, culture change tends to get pushed aside - it’s just not making it through the noise. 

A: When working towards connecting leaders, managers, and employees to the organization’s culture, CHROs should think about each group differently. Leaders, managers, and employees all have their own distinct priorities. When it comes to culture change, HR leaders need to speak the culture connection language of each segment to break through the noise. 

• Leaders care about ”business impact”: While HR leaders tend to think about impact in terms of talent – performance, engagement and retention – other leaders think about impact on business outcomes. Leaders are directly accountable to business impact in a way that I think it’s easy to underestimate. So, when it comes to culture change, HR leaders must show empathy and connect with their leaders by speaking the language of business impact.
• Managers prioritize ”acts of support”: Managers are overwhelmed and facing record levels of burnout, so it’s natural for them to crave support. The key to support them effectively is to actively discuss, not ignore, cultural tensions that will arise in the change. Many organizations leave it to managers to navigate these tensions for their teams; instead, CHROs need to lean in and explicitly discuss these tensions to give managers’ what they need.
• Employees need to ”feel heard”: Culture change only happens when employees behave differently and follow different norms. The culture connection language of employees is active listening - tell employees what the work culture is, and should be, without listening to their perspective at the HR leader’s peril. CHROs should ensure employees feel a sense of ownership of their culture change. 

About the Gartner ReimagineHR Conference

The Gartner ReimagineHR Conference is the premier event for CHROs and HR leaders to learn from the latest research and Gartner experts covering talent acquisition, diversity, equity and inclusion, learning and development, total rewards, talent analytics, and HR technology. Gartner ReimagineHR will be held September 17-18 in London, October 28-30 in Orlando and December 4-5 in Sydney. Follow news and updates from these events on X using #GartnerHR.