Interview: Spotlight on Transforming Work Culture

Transforming culture is a big task and one that HR leaders are trying to accomplish more than ever. As companies try to win the talent war, they are aiming to improve employee engagement and experience by elevating the importance of people, their greatest resource.  

Liz Killen-Scott, Vice President of Workforce Transformation at Ent Credit Union in Colorado, has much experience dealing with cultural change. She will be participating in the session, “Open Discussion: Assessing the Steps Taken to Enhance Employee Empathy and Creating a Sense of Belonging,” at the HR Exchange Network’s 4th Annual HR and Future of Work online event. Recently, Killen-Scott spoke with HR Exchange Network about the challenges that come with influencing work culture and what might be coming next for HR leaders.  

WATCH: HR and Future of Work 

The Dos and Don’ts of Transformation 

HREN: There’s so much talk about the changing workplace culture. What are HR leaders getting right about this transformation? What are they getting wrong?  

LKS: Culture is such a deep topic in so many ways. I’ll start by saying that I’ve never been in a cultural transformation where everyone stood up and cheered and said, ‘Yes, that was great. That was so easy.’  It’s not. It’s hard. If you look at research on culture, you’ll learn about the Iceberg Model. About 10% of what we see of culture is visible. The other 90% is not visible. It’s all those beliefs, assumptions, systems, and processes.  

It’s right to look at culture on a regular basis. I think what HR professionals are getting right is that they are paying attention to culture. It doesn’t necessarily have to change. Sometimes, there are things we want to keep that are good for the organization and team members. What is easy to get wrong about culture is for HR to think that it is their lift, when it’s a total organization’s issue or opportunity. 

Remember, 90% of the iceberg is under the water. HR doesn’t own all that. HR has to get those leaders to want to change and to feel like there is benefit to a cultural shift and redesigning processes.  

Leadership Without the Hard Edges 

HREN: We’ve heard a few HR executives say that people are elevating the hiring of leaders, who are empathetic and have soft skills before they look at their hard skills. Why is this happening? Why are soft skills suddenly the top priority to have in leadership and even more junior employees? 

LKS: Some of those soft skills have been poking up in research for years now. But COVID did the favor of putting us on a greased-up skid. We were thrown into this environment, where people were suddenly working from home. We saw people, including ourselves as leaders, in ways that we never had an opportunity to see them before. I think that prompted leaders to use different muscles. They had to understand we’re all human, and we are trying to get work done.  

The reality is we need a blend of both hard and soft skills in leaders. There’s not a company or business in this entire world that isn’t built on the same resource: people. That’s where empathy comes into play. We work a lot with Gallup, and we’re aligned with their philosophies. Gallup’s understanding is that people want to be valued, recognized, and respected. They want meaningful work.  

When you have leaders who have great empathy, which is related to emotional intelligence, they can ask, “How are you doing?” They can shift things around, so employees can deal with something in their personal life. As we bring our full selves to work, we will see leaders, who have empathy and emotional intelligence, will be stronger.  

There was this vision of what a leader should be and how he should behave. That image is different than today’s image of leaders. And women are taking on senior leadership roles. As a woman in the business world, you were told, “Don’t cry, don’t let them see you sweat.” Men are told that, too. But you’re told to be strong. Now, we’re realizing that we don’t have to be that way.   

Seeing A Different Side 

HREN: Work and life are getting harder to separate, especially now that people are working from their home. How will this influence workplace culture and how does this change our relationships with co-workers? What does this mean for HR? 

LKS:  It depends on the mindset of the HR team. I’ve worked in an HR department that was nervous about legal matters and focused on the compliance part. If HR professionals in your organization are like this, their first thought is, ‘Can they have a worker’s comp claim at home?’ If you have more of an organizational development (OD) mindset in your HR function, you are thinking more about the cultural aspects and opportunities.  

I graduated into HR probably about 20 years ago, so I have an OD mindset. When we first started going through the pandemic, we had to think about all these operational matters. Also, we had to think about how do we support our leaders, who are thinking about how to support their remote employees? They were thinking, ‘How do I support my remote employees? How do I interact with my remote employees? How do I provide leadership and guidance to someone when I’m not there face-to-face?  

Some managers did great. If you’re from a global organization, you probably were already used to global interface and using Zoom. This organization was not used to that. We’re a face-to-face culture. That was a huge shift for us. We had to think, ‘How do we help managers through that transition?’ We helped them blend and understand that you don’t get on your computer and make sure employees’ little icon is green all the time to monitor their work.  It comes back to culture. It comes back to trust.  

We leaned heavily on Gallup research to help our leaders see what is expected. Sometimes, it’s harder for the person working from home to draw those lines. I have worked remotely many times in my career, and I have the tendency to work longer days at home. I’m in the office today, so I get to work an eight-hour day. It’s worse when we’re working with different time zones. You might have to join a meeting at 4 o’clock in the morning to accommodate someone on the other side of the world. When we’re asking people to carve up that time that falls outside the normal eight-hour day, we should be willing to give back in ways like offering flexibility.  

When we flipped the switch and went to remote, we had a lot of nervous leaders unsure of how things were going to go or what was going to happen. We had two of our best years ever. That’s not because people were sitting at home doing nothing. People were working. They were productive. They knew what they needed to get done. They were dedicated and committed.  

HREN: Is there anything else you’d like readers to know?  

LKS: I’ve seen some cultural changes, in which people just wanted to sweep out the badges or change the company name. Those are the easy parts – to rebrand and come up with values. The hard part is getting people to believe in them and to behave them. It’s not easy work, but if you can make it happen, it’s very gratifying to be inside cultural changes that go well.  

Don’t miss your chance to see Killen-Scott and other HR leaders at the HR and Future of Work online event. Register for free here.