Hero Group

Juan Tinoco

Workplace Transformation Leader

We are once again facing the dawn of a new year with a similar feeling we had at this exact time one year ago: uncertainty. Whether you call it VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) or BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible)—it really doesn´t matter, just pick the term you prefer—businesses are starting another cycle in which they have to prepare themselves for the unexpected.

Wars, political elections in around 60 countries, supply chain tensions already affecting manufacturing companies, inflation, and food price raises. These “Black Swans” and “Grey Rhinos” are starting to coexist with some major workforce trends no single organization can neglect the impact of Artificial Intelligence, quiet quitting, “act your wage,” intergenerational tensions, unionization, the potential shift from remote working to return to office. Some experts expect 2024 to be a year of relationship reset between employers and employees.

All these challenges represent a clear call to CEOs, managers, and HR professionals to raise and take responsibility. While our companies need us to achieve the business's short-term targets, we must be proactive and address what it takes to ensure organizational sustainability by building an attractive and engaging workplace that allows our employees to thrive.

“For the first time ever for a centenary organization, we have obtained for two years the Top Employers certification in the main market of the Cluster, just a first step before we extend it to other markets within our company.”

In this particular context, culture becomes a key lever to achieve this aspirational and challenging objective. I especially like James Heskett´s definition of culture as the shared assumptions, values, behaviours, and artifacts that determine and reflect “how and why we do things around here”, because it´s easy to understand for everybody. Culture is the glue that articulates organizations and structures the backbone of all processes, systems, and people's traits and dynamics, building a unique combination that ends in a particular employee experience.

This is why at Hero Southern European Cluster, we have identified Culture as the key long-term People Strategy. Our Hero Flex program, as we named it, is the organizational framework that helps us drive our business strategy by redesigning our Culture. This initiative of Culture reset, based on agile principles, is necessary to allow us to transition from a local to a global and matrix organization, where synergies in processes, systems, and people foster our full business potential aligned with our Group strategy.

A few months ago, we explained how we structured our Hero Flex program here in Manage HR. Concepts like purpose, target settings, accountability, autonomy, transparency, and change agents are structured around three pillars: Corporate Governance (how we manage ourselves), Winner Structure (how we structure ourselves), and Culture and WOW (how we work and behave) with a clear focus on Employee Experience.

Now we are happy to share that, for the first time ever for a centenary organization, we have obtained for two years the Top Employers certification in the main market of the Cluster, just a first step before we extend it to other markets within our company. We feel proud because becoming a top employer is not only a tool to increase our employee value proposition (EVP), but having our culture, people, practices, and policies certified by an objective external entity is a clear reinforcement that our Hero Flex journey is heading in the right direction. Facing the headwinds of all the challenges in this VUCA/BANI reality, Culture is the navigation course that guides our ship.