Your Culture is Everyone's Job: Building Cohesion in a Global Workforce

Title: Irene Hendricks, Chief People Officer at Vimeo Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2025 10:09:00 GMT Duration: 00:10:02 Link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/previ/episodes/Irene-Hendricks--Chief-People-Officer-at-Vimeo-e2tvn3c GUID: 59124b24-e8f1-416f-9420-5096bbf2ae84 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Nobody can mandate a culture into existence. That's the first thing Irene Hendricks will tell you — and she's been building cultures at global tech companies long enough to know how many have tried and failed by doing exactly that. Culture is built by the people inside the organization through listening, iterating, and slowly coalescing around shared principles. The CPO's job is to create the conditions, not the content.

As Chief People Officer at Vimeo, Irene leads a globally dispersed team where culture can't rely on proximity and connection can't rely on chance. Her approach is built on what she calls "connective cadences" — intentional, consistent rhythms of communication across time zones and geographies that replace the organic connection employees used to absorb from shared physical spaces. She's also found asynchronous video communication to be one of the more underutilized tools for maintaining culture at scale: it brings nuance and tone to conversations that would otherwise be stripped of both by email. "Culture is built by everyone within it — you can't sort of mandate or impose a culture, but what you can do is listen, iterate, and coalesce around shared principles."

Irene's approach to HR strategy is tightly integrated with Vimeo's OKR framework — a deliberate choice to connect people programming directly to the company's declared priorities rather than letting it operate in a parallel track. She also makes a compelling case for having HR presence on the ground in key markets: when culture is communicated only from headquarters, what gets received in international offices is often a translation, not the original. Local people team members close that gap.

• Culture as a collective, not a mandate — why leaders can create conditions for culture but not dictate its content
• Connective cadences for globally dispersed teams — the rhythms of communication that replace proximity-based connection
• Asynchronous video as a culture tool — preserving tone, nuance, and humanity in distributed communications
• Local HR presence in global organizations — why on-the-ground team members are essential for culture fidelity
• OKR alignment for HR strategy — connecting people programs directly to declared business priorities
• Adaptability in competitive tech environments — building HR functions that evolve as fast as the businesses they serve

Built by People is sponsored by Previ, the private pricing network that saves employees an average of $2,200/year on essentials like cell phone and auto insurance — free for companies to launch and maintain.