When you’re just trying to stay on top of your inbox, it’s easy to let the big questions fall to the side.
But strengthening culture, no matter what it looks like at your organisation, is essential.
We sat down with Lydia Paris, founder of The Future Works, to get her take on the big culture trends in HR: what we’re talking about too much, and what HR leaders might be missing out on in their organisations.
Along the way, we touched on:
- What defines culture at an organisation
- Strategies for connection across hybrid or remote working
- How to build change readiness into your culture
- Her secret to staying creative
But first: If you want to join Lydia as a member of The Herd, Zinc’s brand-new community bringing talented HR and TA professionals together, sign up for free today.
Hi Lydia! Thanks for chatting with me today. To start — can you give me a quick overview of your career, from uni to founding The Future Works?
I did biology at Oxford, and a lot of what I learned there was around how natural systems work and data analysis. Those skills were actually really helpful in what I do now.
[After uni], I went straight into consulting. I was lucky to work for a number of different boutique consulting firms across my career. [I worked] with lots of different clients — from multinational corporations to small charities to the NHS, startups and scaleups.
As an employee in different settings you feel the culture and how it impacts you. There was a particular organisation I worked at for a few years that had quite a different way of working — they used a self-managed organisation model. It’s a deliberate model that ensures distributed authority across empowered, high-agency teams. It’s a bit more fluid and agile in its structure, and it also places a lot of emphasis on wholeness, belonging, and connection to purpose. It was an immersion into quite a different way of doing things.
That sent me on a bit of a quest: why did that work? For me and other people in the team, it had such an impact on my ability to be productive. I felt really aligned to the organisation and trusted.
At The Future Works, we incorporate all of those principles and ideas into leading culture change for our clients. We lead culture transformation strategy development and leadership development for our clients — a suite of different things — and the importance of culture underpins all of that.
You can have the best strategy in the world, but if your culture isn’t there to support it and help implement it, then it’s wasted effort.
Going back to the basics, how would you define culture at an organisation?
I think of it as “the way that we do things around here.” It’s as much about what you can see and observe through behaviours, what we say, how leadership is, and the policies we have as it is what you can’t see.
What you can’t see are the unwritten rules and assumptions that people make. It’s the mindsets that people have, the beliefs that people have that inform their actions and how they work.
All of that together produces characteristics, your ‘culture’, that can either enhance or hinder your success as an organisation.
You’ve had a chance to sit within a lot of different organisations, see how they work, and what doesn’t work. What’s one workforce trend you think is overhyped?
The question of hybrid or remote working. Obviously, it’s a huge challenge to culture. But I think at the core of culture and organisational development is an understanding that things are always going to change. And you need to develop your systems and a culture that works in that context.
So I think the question of whether it’s ‘good or bad’ to do remote working misses the point a bit – there will always be big changes that influence how we run organisations, the key is to come back to what you want to achieve as an organisation, what the problems are you want to solve as an organisation, and then design your culture and ways of working to support that.
What you’re trying to do with culture is allow people to feel like they belong and perform in the way they need to to achieve your organisations goals, and feel good while doing it.
How do you think companies can find ways to build that connectedness really intentionally in a remote or hybrid environment?
There are ways of communicating that can really enhance that sense of belonging, and you obviously have to try a bit harder when you’re remote and not always in the same office together. It’s about overcommunicating strategically and sharing with people how they can get involved, how it’s going, and what the impact is, and so on. It’s creating opportunities for face-to-face communication where it’s meaningful, but also it’s how you communicate through your online channels.
Even check-ins can be so powerful in terms of building that sense of connection: actually asking people how they are and getting a bit vulnerable. That usually has to come from the leader of the group to set the tone.
Are there any workforce or HR trends you think people aren’t talking about enough?
I think a big one we aren’t talking about enough is change readiness. One thing that will always be constant is change.
I’m not the first person to say this, but AI is obviously going to get bigger and bigger. Also, as resources become more scarce and markets are volatile, all these external pressures create a need [for organisations] to be agile that’s not going away.
The more we can build change readiness to culture, the more resilient the organisation is to those external pressures. A lot of the talk is around how to grow and stabilise, but I think we should always be looking at how we can stay able to be unstable.
Are there any specific practices you’ve seen that work really well for preparing that change readiness?
The more you close the gap between leadership and colleagues working ‘on the ground’, you get better communication flow and more devolved decision-making, closer to the ground where the delivery is happening. This helps you be aware of and responsive to change as it comes up. There are all kinds of different ways of building teams that can help reduce the gap between leadership and the people delivering the work.
The other way is just a general culture of high trust, high challenge. It’s basically the sense that you’re able to challenge without fear of reprimand. Feeling like you can question things and not be worried about that, regardless of where you sit in the organisation.
Connectedness and centering the mission of the organisation [is the third way]. What we deliver and how we deliver it might change, but if we’re always focusing on the mission and how that’s going to be expressed, that’s our north star and it’s easier to make decisions in line with that.
Obviously, all these strategies require quite a bit of buy-in from senior leadership. How do you convince a skeptical leadership team to invest in people-first initiatives and steer culture?
I always say that it’s their choice. We’re not here to force or convince anyone, but the evidence speaks for itself. Lower turnover, better loyalty, better revenue — all these things come from having a culture that’s alright.
Culture change and maintenance might feel like a short-term grind, but it’s a long-term win for everyone. It’s recognising that culture actually is a strategic driver of performance and it shouldn’t just be left to chance. It’s going to influence your outcomes. But it’s not always easy, comfortable, or fun to do.
It can feel really personal for leaders, especially if it’s founder-led. For someone internal, if you need to work with the executive team on something, how do you create space to have these more vulnerable conversations and bring them along? You can talk about the evidence, the numbers, and the need. But leading with the human is always a good place to start.
Okay, quick-fire questions: How do you stay creatively energised in an emotionally demanding field?
Having breaks. Obviously, I’m leading my company and it’s driven largely by me. Taking time off is actually a way that I stay creatively energised, which I didn’t always think was important, but I've realised that creating space for rest and freedom of thought is really important for my biggest breakthroughs.
When you do get a break, what do you do to switch off from work?
I physically remove myself from my work environment and try to do something that really takes my attention. I play guitar and do yoga, connect with people, that all really helps me switch off. Activities which activate the right side of my brain, since I spend most of the day in the left side.
If you could write a one-sentence mission statement for your career, what would it say?
I’ve spent my career helping leaders who know that things can’t stay the same, but don’t know how to get to what’s better.
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