SHRM Talent Sneak Peek: Aligning Workplace Culture to Vision

Successful organizations go beyond just establishing a mission, vision, and core values — they build and maintain a workplace culture that embodies these principles. 

Company culture exists whether an organization is intentional about it or not. Through everyday interactions, processes, and procedures, cultural norms take root. HR leaders play a role in ensuring the organization’s behavior synergizes with the culture vision. 

Catherine Mattice, founder and CEO of Civility Partners in San Diego, will  present ways to establish an organizationally aligned workplace culture on March 25 at  SHRM Talent 2025. The session is open to registered in-person attendees in Nashville as well as registered remote attendees.  

Mattice briefly discussed her upcoming session with SHRM.

SHRM: What are the various forces that make up workplace culture? 

Mattice: Workplace culture is made up of three forces: the behavior of each individual at all levels, the behavior of the organization, and the behavior of the leadership team.  

Individual behavior is about how people act on a daily basis.  

Organizational behavior is about processes, systems, and accountability measures, such as the performance management system, recruiting process, compensation procedures, and rewards. 

Leadership team behavior is about the top group in leadership and their willingness to provide resources towards the culture and hold people accountable to the right behaviors, as well as their communication and transparency with the workforce. 

When all three of these things are aligned, or in synergy, the organization has an engaged and productive workforce that has a positive impact on the bottom line. When they’re out of synergy, the organization sees a toxic workplace due to mixed messaging and ambiguous information from the organization.

SHRM Members-Only Content: How to Build a Strong Organizational CultureSHRM: What is one top strategy for aligning an organization’s behavior with its culture vision? 

Mattice: An easy-to-do action item is to pick a concept or initiative and review it based on these three forces.  

If you’re focused on creating a culture of innovation, for example, then you must consider: 

• How you are both influencing and hindering innovation. Facilitating innovation would include training programs around problem-solving, collaboration, psychological safety, and using the available tech tools to be innovative. Hindering innovation would be allowing toxic behavior that harms the ability for people to learn and share their ideas. 
• How the organization’s behavior is influencing and hindering innovation. Look at all of your HR processes and determine where they stand. For example, does your performance management system measure people on their ability to be innovative and their ability to create safe spaces for everyone else to be innovative? Do you reward people for these skills, and do you also reward and promote people who don’t have these skills? If it’s the latter, you’re hindering innovation. Also consider auditing risk factors that can harm innovation, such as bureaucracy, a homogenous workforce, or isolated workspaces. 
• Whether the leadership team is putting resources towards innovation. If you’re not able to offer the right programs to influence individuals or to hold people accountable to the behavior you seek, then you won’t reach a culture of innovation.  

SHRM: What can attendees expect to take away from your session? 

Mattice: I am going to walk attendees through these three forces of culture, what they mean, and how to take action on all three forces. We’ll look at case studies with misalignment and discuss how to create alignment. Attendees will walk away with a list of actions they can implement right away to turn around a toxic culture, build on the culture they seek to create, or sustain a great culture they already have in place.