Irene Hendricks
Chief People Officer
Vimeo
Episode 311
Your Culture is Everyone's Job: Building Cohesion in a Global Workforce
Current chapter: Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
Built By PeopleFebruary 7, 2025 · 10:02
Thesis
“A strong, adaptable corporate culture, collectively built and sustained by effective communication tools, is essential for aligning HR strategies with business objectives and attracting top talent in a competitive, globally dispersed workforce.”
Show notes
In this episode of the Built by People podcast sponsored by Previ, host Dave D'Angelo welcomes Irene Hendricks, an HR executive with diverse experience in the field and currently at Vimeo. Irene shares her career journey across various industries and explains the evolution of Vimeo's people-first strategy, emphasizing the importance of a resonant culture across global markets. She discusses the alignment of HR strategies with company OKRs, effective cultural inclusivity practices, and how Vimeo's products enhance employee engagement. Irene also reflects on the lessons she's learned in building corporate culture, including the significance of employee input and adaptability in a competitive tech landscape, and offers parting advice to ensure a fulfilling career aligned with one's passions. 00:16 Sponsorship Message from Previ 00:44 Guest Introduction: Irene's Career Journey 01:25 Vimeo's People-First Strategy 03:06 Fostering an Inclusive and Creative Culture 04:16 Aligning HR Strategies with Business Objectives 06:13 Enhancing Employee Engagement with Vimeo's Tools 07:44 Lessons on Building Strong Corporate Culture 09:20 Parting Advice and Conclusion
What you'll take away
- 1Culture is built by everyone within an organization through listening, iterating, and coalescing around shared principles, not by mandate.
- 2For global organizations, having local 'people team' members on the ground is crucial to ensure culture and employee offerings resonate in diverse markets.
- 3Implement intentional 'connective cadences' and leverage asynchronous video communication to keep dispersed remote, hybrid, and in-office employees aligned.
- 4Align HR strategies with business objectives by using company-wide OKRs as a foundational framework for individual and team goal setting.
- 5Invest in people through a 'growth strategy' that focuses on continuous development and skill-building to meet evolving organizational needs.
What most organizations get wrong
- •Avoid the 'brilliant jerk phenomenon' by ensuring that high-performing individuals are also culturally congruent and build positive experiences for colleagues, rather than solely focusing on their output.
In Irene's words
“culture is built by everyone within it. And so, you can't sort of mandate or impose a culture, but what you can do is listen, you can iterate, and you can coalesce around principles of a culture, processes, artifacts that really help anchor that culture and give people congruence in their experience.”
This quote emphasizes a bottom-up, collaborative approach to culture building, highlighting active listening and iteration over top-down mandates.
“as a global organization, one of the things that's very important to us is making sure that culture and our employee offerings resonate in all of the markets that we do business in. We're officially in 11 countries right now, entering a couple more markets this year.”
This highlights the complexity and critical importance of localizing HR and cultural strategies for effectiveness in a multinational company.
“there's not a great substitute for live communication, but the video solution is really key and is the absolute best way to convey concepts in bite-sized and accessible ways.”
This emphasizes the strategic role of video as a powerful tool for asynchronous and digestible communication in modern, dispersed workforces.
“we're really trying to anchor on making sure that we are being agile in responding to new skills that need to come into our organization, SaaS company. So obviously technical skills are really critical. We've got an ambitious roadmap in terms of new features that we want to embed into our product set.”
This demonstrates a proactive approach to workforce planning, linking HR strategy directly to product development and the need for evolving technical skills.
“if you are thinking about joining an organization, make sure that the product and what that organization is about really resonates with you. Make sure it excites you. Make sure that it's something that's interesting to you. And then a day at work really feels like a very joyous experience.”
This offers personal career advice, underscoring the importance of aligning individual values and interests with a company's mission for long-term job satisfaction.
The problems this episode addresses
- •Global organizations struggle to ensure cultural principles and employee offerings resonate effectively across diverse international markets, leading to potential disengagement if not localized.
- •Dispersed workforces (remote, hybrid, in-office) face challenges in maintaining alignment, connection, and a unified sense of purpose without intentional communication strategies.
- •Companies in fast-evolving sectors like SaaS need agile talent acquisition and development strategies to continuously acquire and nurture new technical skills required for ambitious product roadmaps.
- •Conveying information quickly and in an easily consumable format to employees, especially for critical updates and enablement, is a constant challenge for HR and internal communications teams.
In this episode
Built by People podcast features insights from world's top HR leaders
Built by People
Irene: Dave has been at Vimeo for 6 months now
Interview: Vimeo's People-first Strategy
Vimeo is committed to fostering a culture that is inclusive and driving creativity
Vimeo's Inclusive Culture
How do you align human resource strategies with Vimeo's business objectives
How do Human Resources Strategies align with Vimeo's Business Objective's
Vimeo products and tools contribute to enhancing employee engagement within your organization
How Vimeo's products and tools enhance employee engagement
What lessons have you learned about building strong corporate culture throughout your career
Building a Strong Corporate Culture
Irene has some parting advice for anyone thinking about joining an organization
In the End of an Organization's Career
Topics covered
Organizations and entities mentioned
Full transcript
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