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BUILD A COMPANY CULTURE
​THAT UNITES AND DELIGHTS

3 JULY 2025

EXPERT INSIGHT

Creating a warm and inclusive company culture can be challenging – how do you ensure your teams feel connected when working globally, hybrid, or remote? What tools or strategies could help bridge the gap? What steps can you take to embrace diversity, empower your people to be authentic, and sustain a culture that’s open and welcoming? Join us to discover more.

EXPERT INSIGHT:
​Samuel Pelaez Perez | MYNGLE

SPEAKERS:
​Jihane Majoch | DEKRA
​Sari Ek-Petroff | ENENTO GROUP
​Lucia Melcore | P&G Europe
​Oyiza Salu | Polaris Bank Limited

Samuel Pelaez Perez
​Commercial Director
​MYNGLE

KEY POINTS

  • True leadership requires emotional regulation, self-awareness, and personal growth. As Perez noted, “If you can’t manage yourself, you can’t manage a team.” Promoting top performers without assessing leadership readiness risks undermining the entire team dynamic.
  • A high-performing team needs to feel safe—emotionally, psychologically, and culturally. Leaders must create environments where people feel heard, respected, and secure enough to take risks and speak up.
  • Today’s workforce expects more than perks—they want purpose, clarity, development, and meaning. Leaders must go beyond traditional management and foster a culture of growth, transparency, and human connection.
  • A leader’s energy is contagious and shapes the tone of every interaction. But enthusiasm isn’t about forced positivity—it’s about authenticity and momentum. Leaders who stop evolving risk stagnating their teams and organizations.

Jihane Majoch
​Country Human Resources Director
​DEKRA

KEY POINTS

  • Company culture cannot be universally defined—it’s an abstract, context-specific force that, when neglected, undermines competitiveness. At Dekra, culture is a strategic pillar, upheld through five core values (Customer Focus, Integrity, Team Spirit, Responsibility, Safety) that every employee, in every country and role, is expected to live daily.
  • Placing employees at the center of strategy directly impacts customer satisfaction. Dekra’s people strategy spans recruitment, talent management, digital communication of successes and challenges, and rigorous physical and mental safety training—ensuring a consistently positive employee experience.
  • Effective leaders at Dekra act as coaches and role models, fostering full potential in their teams. They balance solution-orientation with “economic thinking,” ensuring that rules and financial realities are clearly communicated, and they embrace multicultural differences as a source of strength.
  • Culture is co-created by generations of employees and must adapt to technological and demographic shifts. Dekra uses global and psychosocial surveys, cross-regional forums, and anniversary events to collect feedback, and refine practices—changing behaviors at the top to drive sustainable cultural evolution.

Sari Ek-Petroff
​HR Director
​ENENTO GROUP

KEY POINTS

  • The organization adopted emotional agency as the foundation for leadership development—encouraging leaders to recognize, own, and manage their emotions and those of others. This shift repositions leadership from managing facts to leading human beings with empathy and psychological safety.
  • What began as a leadership development program evolved into a full cultural transformation initiative. Emotional agency is now being extended to the entire organization, fostering a shared language and mindset around emotions, trust, and collaboration.
  • The company tracks culture and leadership effectiveness through bi-weekly pulse surveys. Key indexes—collaboration, growth mindset, psychological safety, and personal development—have all improved significantly, even during challenging periods like layoffs.
  • Despite mergers, remote work disruptions, and external instability, the leadership’s commitment to clear goals and a unified Nordic working culture helped anchor the organization. Purpose, vision, and emotional intelligence are seen as strategic levers to navigate uncertainty.

Lucia Melcore
​HR Director Equality & Inclusion
​P&G Europe

KEY POINTS

  • P&G’s experience highlights that using rigid generational definitions (e.g., Gen Z, Gen X) can lead to oversimplifications and reinforce biases. Employees increasingly reject these labels, indicating a need for more nuanced, context-driven dialogue.
  • Despite assumptions, employees across age groups express similar needs around learning, development, flexibility, and well-being. What differs is not the need itself, but how it is expressed—shaped by lived experiences and macro trends such as technology and workplace evolution.
  • Using design thinking and people analytics, P&G identified seven underserved employee segments. This led to targeted actions such as reverse mentoring, people manager training, and intergenerational dialogue initiatives at the European leadership level.
  • P&G has redesigned its wellbeing framework to be more flexible and inclusive, offering fewer but more adaptable solutions tailored to diverse employee needs across life stages, cultural backgrounds, and professional experiences.

Oyiza Salu
​Chief Talent & Culture Officer
​Polaris Bank Limited

KEY POINTS

  • Polaris Bank, formed through the merger of multiple legacy institutions, inherited a fragmented culture marked by silos and hierarchical structures. This complexity impacted creativity, speed to market, and cross-functional collaboration.
  • The Bank initiated a three-phase transformation process that included surveys, focus groups, and leadership workshops. Five core behaviours: Bias for Action, Respect, Accountability, Collaboration, and Exemplary Leadership—were identified and integrated into a cultural handbook.
  • To embed the new culture, Polaris launched the GRACE Movement, which promotes one core behaviour each week in team meetings through concrete examples. Recognition of individuals who exemplify the new values is central to driving adoption.
  • Despite changes in leadership and ongoing regulatory restructuring by the Central Bank of Nigeria, the organisation is committed to embedding the culture into systems and processes to ensure long-term continuity—regardless of future ownership or governance.

THANK YOU!


​NEXT INTERNATIONAL HRC SQUARE:

PROMOTE ALLYSHIP AND FOSTER A MORE INCLUSIVE WORKPLACE CULTURE | 13 November

FULL PROGRAM HERE

CONTACT:
​international@hrcigroup.com / r.campanaro@hrcigroup.com