If you ride in on your white unicorn shooting trust arrows and sprinkling culture glitter, are you the magical Chief Culture Officer?

Probably not — someone will call security or dial 911, and you’ll be hauled away quicker than most of your management colleagues can tell you how poorly you’ve been collaborating and knowledge-sharing, both of which contribute to quality workplace cultures.

And, unfortunately, that means HR folks are the not-so-magical professionals in whom management folks usually place responsibility for cultural onboarding – from recruiting, to hiring. to training, to retaining. And yet, according to a recent study by global business consultants The Hackett Group, 79% of executives were dissatisfied with HR’s collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

That was just one of many criticisms of HR, the best of the worst coming from recruiting colleagues who said their HR leaders were kinda okay, but not really. What surprises me about all of this is that organizations have decimated the people management and development budgets of the past five years, with little or no support being given to the growing number of progressive HR leaders and other executives who actually want to better facilitate cultures of trust, sharing, collaboration and learning (sans the unicorn, arrows and glitter).

Most of us in talent acquisition and management know that culture and trust fuel productivity, retention and unified business growth. And even if you don’t buy the culture line, if I don’t have anything beyond short-term affinity, then productivity will wane quickly, killing business growth.

Think about organizations today — the greater cultural ecosystem of the business is made up of full-time employees, part-time employees, flex-time employees, temporary employees, contractors, vendors, service providers, alumni, new applicants — and let’s not forget the customers. This morning on Facebook my friend Bryan Wempen, from DriveThruHR, wrote:

Just pointing out that social networking is powerful; the two way conversation is happening WITH or without you corporate america. American Airlines did a great job today being in the conversation, very nice. I always try to balance my bitchin’ and compliments about 20/80 if possible. Just kidding….LOL

Kidding aside he then shared the Twitter exchange between himself and American Airlines. Today businesses are big, messy melting pots of talent communities that spill over onto one another constantly — true talent communities in every sense of the words, offering professionals and organizations the ability to connect, communicate and collaborate.

All three activities take place not just around employer brands for the sake of branding and marketing, but also around customer service exchanges, relevant learning and developing opportunities for an organization’s entire cultural ecosystem. The bulk of it helps to elevate the 21st-century value of long-tail engagement, learning and all different kinds of growth — again, with cultures of trust fueling productivity, retention and unified business growth.

Let’s give back the tools, resources, the quivers of arrows and, yes, the glitter to the Chief Culture Officers, HR, executive management and anybody and everybody who executes on cultures of trust and fuels team-slash-work learning and loyalty. Again, thank you, Matt Monge, for your guest moderation of this important topic on #TChat. Already, we can barely wait for next week’s #TChat World of Work. Check out the slideshow below of your tweets from yesterday. Did you miss the preview? Go here.

Image Credit: Stock.xchng

 

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#TCHAT RECAP: THE CHIEF CULTURE OFFICER, ONBOARDING & BEYOND

Storified by TalentCulture · Wed, Aug 15 2012 17:37:58