144 | Leading Culture in a Hybrid World | Scott McInnes & Phil Codd

At Inspiring Change, we help our clients build work cultures that bring out the best in their people. We created this podcast to share real stories and insights from those who are shaping better workplaces every day. So grab a cuppa and pop in your earbuds wherever you are. You're very welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast. We're excited to have you with us. Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. Really nice to have you back if you're a former listener, and if you're a new listener, you are very welcome. Scott McInnes, thanks a million for being here. Before we get on to today's guest, our first guest for 2026, a couple of wee bits of housekeeping and a small ask for you, dear listener. Whatever platform you're listening on, please, if you could just take a few minutes to give us a bit of feedback, give us a little rating. It really, really helps to get the podcast out there to spread the good word. We spend a lot of time and effort pulling these together. We hope you find them helpful and having them out in front of more people would be amazing. So if you could do that, I would very much appreciate it. Onto today's guest. So, when I'm interviewing guests beforehand, I always kind of describe them in one of three buckets. That we've got kind of famous-ish people on the podcast, the likes of Fergal Quinn previously, or Jamie Heaslip, or Stuart Lancaster. We've got kind of consultant-type people in the middle bucket who've got maybe a book or a model or a framework or something. And then we've got What today's guest falls into the third bucket of what I might term, probably unfairly slightly, I need to think of a new term for this, kind of common old garden people leaders. Just people who are actually— I know, I'm sorry, Phil, I'll get to you in a second. Just people who are actually out there doing the job because it's really easy for consultants and sports people and stuff to talk about high performance and how you get things done and how to build better culture. But actually, we then take that perhaps and we temper it with the reality of having to run a business. Today's guest is Phil Codd, who is the Managing Director of Explio in Ireland. They're a global technology firm and a consulting service provider. He's got just under 1,000 staff in Ireland, so it's a big organization across Dublin, Cork, and Galway. Huge focus on digital transformation. So I'm hoping we'll get to chat a little bit about the cultural needs or requirements to make transformation land with clients. Perhaps that'd be interesting to have a little chat about later on, Phil, but also just within your own organization. And of course, as a consultancy business, when you've got people who are out and about, managing your culture can be incredibly difficult because people can go rogue. They end up in client site for a year. You might lose them. So we're going to touch off a lot of that stuff later. Probably one thing worth mentioning as well is Phil comes with a bit of pedigree, voted by Business Finance as one of the top CEOs in Ireland last year and a shortlist on the CEO of the Year by the Business Post the year before. So Phil, that's a bit of pedigree.

Scott, thanks for the intro. I'm happy to be a van Aldenaer as opposed to a famous person. So thank you for that. And yeah, look, it's great to join you. And I think being able to share some of my experience and some of my thoughts just might help others out there.

Fabulous. So let's start with a giant question, right? And this could go anywhere. What does organizational culture mean to you and why is it so important?

So I think, as I said before, culture isn't just one thing. I think organizations have multiple cultures, and at a very minimum, they have two cultures. There's the leadership culture and there is the employee workforce, and they quite often clash. And the trick ultimately is to try and get them some way aligned, and therefore that benefits both of the cultures and ultimately the company. So if you can consider Quite simply, I'm on my own in the jungle and I'm wandering around for years. And then one day I meet somebody and they're like me and we join together. Suddenly we have a culture. We may meet other people on that journey and we will build a culture quite quickly. We won't decide on it. We won't decide what our values are, what our mission is, because we know what it is. We've got to stay alive. We've got to keep warm. We've got to feed ourselves. But eventually, it will come quite quickly to the fore that somebody is the leader. Somebody will say, we should take this path. It's a little shorter. Or we won't drink here. We'll drink further down the river because the water's better. And ultimately, that's how a culture comes together. If you and I were to form a company tomorrow, we would have a culture immediately. So there's always a culture within any organization. And as I said, it really is multiple cultures. And if you think of a culture in its biological state, it needs to be kept warm, it needs to be fed, and it needs to grow. And that's really what a culture is in any organization.

It's interesting that you take that perspective of a leadership culture versus an everyone else culture. Tell me a little bit more about your thinking around that, because I've got some thoughts then after on the whole, every organization has a culture. It absolutely does organically. We'll come back to that in a sec though. Talk to me a little bit more about that idea of different cultures for leadership and employee groups.

Yeah, and it's not leadership versus employee, so that's very important. But it is a fact that within any organization you will have at least those two elements to the overall culture, if you like, of the company. And I think the leadership culture has a critical part to play because it needs to feed and nurture the employee culture. And obviously, everybody that's a leader is also a member of the employee culture. And then within any organization, you know, even within the employee group, there's going to be other subgroupings. They may be geographic, they may be based on, on the role that they actually do. And again, understanding that they exist and need to coexist is vitally important because otherwise they are, you know, it's us versus them. It's this group versus that group. And that leads to disharmony. And really what you're looking to do is align as best as possible both of those or all of those to actually get a culture working within your organization.

Yeah, absolutely. And that was, I guess, was going to be my point, that alignment piece being so critically important. So that means that you've got to have at the top of the organization, at the leadership team level, whilst every organization has a culture, it might not have a culture which is directly impacting or aligned with your strategy. And of course, for me, culture is just a vessel through which, a channel through which organizations achieve their strategy. So, if you don't have a culture which is deliberately and intentionally set towards what you need in order to achieve your strategy, then for me, that culture is not right.

You're right. It has a significant impact on the success of that company. And we started working a number of years ago with the Great Place to Work organization. And the basic premise is that happy employees equals happy customers equals growth. And then obviously the reverse. And so really understanding that, you know, you've got to work hard at keeping your employees happy, content, that you're giving them the right sort of work, you're rewarding them in the right sort of way, not necessarily just monetarily, but also that you've got their interests at heart, that you are actually taking a huge interest in what they do, how they do, rather than just it's a job you do 9 to 5 and you're kind of paid from the neck down because that doesn't engender a happy organization. And over the years, I've worked for a number of different organizations, some very large. Back in my times with people like Oracle or with SAP, and then going back even before that, you know, very small companies. It was often talked about, we've got a, we've got to work hard, play hard. Culture. Is that actually what we want? We've got a culture of reward. Yes. Well, that sounds pretty good. And it's a mixture of all of these. But certainly what we don't want is a culture where people really get up in the mornings and they dread the thought of having to work for an organization. And I've seen it very recently in a retail organization that's family owned. And the family aren't very good at running the organization. So their employees are fairly disgruntled, yet they're quite unaware of it. So it's being able to, to communicate with everybody that's in the organization. And I think communication for me is one of those critical leadership skills. It's not just about talking. It's not just about the message. It's about how you communicate. It's about being able to communicate, you know, in both directions. And that means that it's not just giving out the message, but it's also being able to listen to the message that's coming back. And for me, that's something I've worked on over the years to make sure that I can adapt my communications to the right situation organizationally. So A great example of that is when I first came here, we were much smaller. I think we were about 40 people at the time. And I started an MD call because our people work with our clients, so not everybody's back physically in the central office. And we started that out and it was a monthly call. It was, here's what's going on, here's how business is, here are some fun things to know. And, you know, to this day, and it's 18 years now, that I've been here, it's continued on. And every now and again, you know, we stop and we say, do you still want the MD call to continue? Because I'm happy to say, you know, if they say no, we'd like something else, and they say no, we want the MD call. In fact, last year they even said, would I turn my camera on? Now you can see me, Scott McInnes, so you know how unpleasant I can be, but that was Again, that makes two of us.

That makes two of us. I'll take that bullet as well.

That was part of the communication style. And so it's a very useful tool. But communication is critical because sometimes it's great messages, sometimes it's maybe bad news. But whatever it is, you've got to be able to get the message into the organization, understanding what the message is. And also, as I said, listening to get that feedback, because quite often If it's not landing well, then you've not communicated in the right way.

You know what? And I would often say to our clients, you might be thinking you're saying something, but that's not what it's about. It's about what the people are hearing. That's what really matters, because there is that breakdown between what you say and what they hear. So actually, that feedback loop that you've described is so fundamentally important, because you nearly want to put the message out and then say to people, what do you think I told you? Just to double-check that the message that you think you were putting out there is the message that was going out there. I wanted to come back to your Great Place to Work survey that you mentioned earlier on, because actually, even within that, and from a feedback loop perspective, of course, that's a big chunk of feedback for you every year for the years that you've done that survey. How do you close out that loop? So you do the survey, you get the feedback, then what?

So we created a Great Place to Work group within the organization. It was open to everybody, and we get the results from the Great Place to Work. We can distill it down and share it with the group. We share ultimately all the results with everybody in the organization. But it's that group that's responsible for sifting and sorting along with us to see where are some areas that we need to perhaps make, make changes. And that's worked well. But your point there is that it is once a year and, you know, that can depend on when we do it. Is it before Christmas? Is it after Christmas? And we then invested in an excellent tool. So using some technology to actually help us get a more speedy and consistent feel of the organization, a pulse check, if you like. And we started working with a company called Workie. WRKY, who came out of DCU, and they're growing on a monthly basis. And what they enable us to do is, is run a set of quick checks with everybody on a continuous basis, and we can increase the frequency or decrease it. It also allows anyone within the organization to sort of put a pulse check out there. And, you know, again, it's quite helpful for for line managers if they want to see what's going on. The real beauty is not— is it— it's real currency, but it also lets us look for problem areas. So the psychobabble behind it is, you know, there are some lead indicators in the questions. And again, a good example, we thought we were doing wonderfully. You know, we were getting good results, but When we pulled it back, we found that there was a group of people in the middle of the organization. So they weren't the newbies and they weren't the ones at the very senior, but they felt unloved and ignored. And the reason was we were putting a lot of effort into bringing new people in at the time of growth. We had a wonderful grad program running, so a lot of energy going there, but not so much going here., and we didn't hear the noise. They were the silent witness to the problem, and we were able to actually then look at that and try and find ways of A) reaching out to them, B) seeing where, you know, their discomfort was, and C) could we actually remediate that and help them? And over a period of time, you know, we were able to bring various policies and programs in place to focus back in on them. And I'm glad to say it had a very positive outcome. Yeah, yeah.

And practically, what did some of that mitigation look like, or some of those programs look like to try and support that group that you've described?

Yeah, a couple of things. One very obvious one was we weren't necessarily celebrating people's longevity with the company. And so it was a fairly easy thing to put in place an annual event where we recognize people that have been with us 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, and also reward that in some way. So bringing people together, we then discovered that, you know, I think we started at 5 years and then the people that were there for 3 years said, oh, well, how come we're excluded? So we do graduate it. I mean, if you've been here a year, you do get you do get thanked. But if you've been here 3 years, you know, then you get included, 5, 10, and 15. So that was a very straightforward, practical way, but it had a major impact because people felt that they were included, they weren't forgotten about because they've been here a long time. So that was only one. Greater investment in learning and development was another area. So, you know, looking at the, the needs of that group of people. And again, you know, they were perhaps with us a number of years, they had reasonably senior roles, so coming up with just one program wasn't, wasn't going to work. We needed to come up with a number of layers that we could invest with them, and it was important that they got something out of it as well as the company got something out of it. So it certainly had to add to to their career and to their aspirations. And so we set about creating a program with an external provider to build that. So they're two pretty tangible examples of where we looked at the results from Workie and the surveys we were getting and how we converted that into real actions.

This episode is brought to you by Inspiring Change. We work with senior teams to help them be clear and intentional about the culture what they need to be successful, to communicate change in a more human way, and to give their leaders the skills, tools, and confidence to be amazing catalysts for change. To learn more about our work and who we do it for, just pop along to inspiringchange.ie. What's Workie actually asking? So you do your Great Place to Work survey once a year. That's great. It gives you a once-a-year moment in time snapshot of the organization. I think the challenge with— and this we'll get into this in a sec with Workie. The challenge of once-a-year snapshots is, as you said, you might have done it just before Christmas, you might have done it just after Christmas, you might have done it just after you've had to unfortunately let a raft of people go, you might just have done it after pay rises and everyone's in a great space and they've just been given a bonus. All of that is going to skew the results. But of course, having the week-to-week, month-to-month pulse with a company like the one that you're working with can be incredibly powerful. So I'm just wondering, what questions— is there a set of questions that you can then benchmark against over time, or how does that work?

There's a very specific set of questions, and they are questions like, how are you feeling today? Do you feel empowered today? Do you feel valued today? Does your manager value you? Are you equipped with the tools to do your job today? So it's all about in the moment, and it's about you as an individual. And by repeating those, you can then build up psychometric patterns as to, you know, have you got groups of people that, as I say, are, are very happy because they're doing great work? Or, or maybe it's, it's a group of people that are out with clients. It is, it is anonymized, obviously, so we can't go down to the very depth of who said what. But it does also enable people to provide feedback, comments. So once a month, the management team will get together and we'll go through and we'll look at the comments because again, in there can sometimes be the hidden gems that says, you know, something's going really, really well or there is a problem area that we need to probably consider and address it.

One thing you said there, Phil, about your colleagues that are out with clients, of course, as an IT services company, I presume a big chunk of your colleagues, the people that work in the organization, are on client site. Are they?

Yes and no. I mean, we have hybrid working here and flexible working. So, you know, since COVID and that's 6 years ago now, you know, when we all—

6 years.

I know, it's scary, isn't it? In March, it will be 6 years. So, you know, we introduced hybrid working, we introduced flexible working from home, and for us it's remained and it's dictated by the client. So if the client says you must have your people with us 5 days a week, then that's what's going to happen. But actually, the reality is, is the client also has flexible working. And whilst I know in the Irish market there's a great debate still going on as to what's the right thing, I think that kind of flexibility is what gives working from home its kind of strength. But at the same time, you know, it can obviously be weakness. There is— I read an article earlier on this week all about loneliness at work. So people are sort of finding it quite lonely. So you've got to put in place social programs that bring people together. You do have to get together as a company at least once a quarter. And that's what we would do. You've got to invent things which will bring people into the office, perhaps. Lunch dates. We had one yesterday, actually. So we provide lunch, everybody that's in the area, you know, come in and enjoy. The other thing with flexible working is, of course, there are financial benefits to it. I don't have the cost necessarily of traveling every day. I can feed myself probably a lot cheaper because I'm not paying my cappuccino and my sandwich. But also from a child-rearing point of view and from You know, crash fees, again, it's something that's been in the news very recently, that the number of crash and preschool places that have closed in the last 2 to 3 years is moving up towards 1,000 or more across the country. So, you know, if we expect us— ourselves to increase the number of female workers as we look for better gender balance, then we've got to make sure that we've got policies in place and things that are beneficial to that cohort of people. So, for example, maternity benefit, you know, making sure that when people are on maternity, we pay their full salary. So that takes away the angst of what happens when, you know, I'm just left with the state welfare. We have returning programs so that when you finish your maternity, you can't just come back on day one and start back in. 5 days a week. So we gradually introduce people back into it. Parental leave and parents' leave is also fully paid for. So it's that kind of support. And all of these things have come about through things like Great Place to Work and through Workie. And something that we recently introduced was some flexibility around holidays. We now have a much more multicultural organization. Once upon a time, you know, we were predominantly Irish only. Now we have over 35 nationalities, and a lot of people like to go back, particularly around the Christmas time or around certain holiday times, and be able to, you know, stay a bit longer. And can they actually buy some flexibility in their holidays? And that came about, and that was a policy we put in place. And we even have a policy around pet bereavement. So if you have a pet that has recently passed, there is a day that you can take on top of your holidays. And again, I'm not really sure how I agree to this one, but again, you know, it's there for people, and it's through that feedback that these things come about.

It's a big thing, losing a pet, and, you know, for lots of people, that would be like losing a parent or a child or a Anything. It's a loss. And it's great that you see that. Let me rewind a wee bit back to flexi working, because as you said there, hybrid flexi, I think we just need to call it working because that's what it is.

It is now.

And stop, yeah, I know. Yeah, it is now. And we just have to stop giving it a name. There is still, you touched on it there, Phil, a debate about is it right, is it wrong? Do we push, as many of the big tech companies have done and lots of big financial institutions have done, pushed the nuclear red button? We're in Bank of Ireland pull people in a little bit more, AIB pull people back in a little bit more. That's having a bit of a detrimental impact as we've seen written up in the media. Yeah, my take on it, I've got a theory that actually the one thing that we have failed to do as organizations is to rethink how we work or the work that we do when we're in the places that we're in. That we look at flexi working or how we work today and it's only, is Phil in the office working or is he at home working? And what we fail to do actually is think about, well, what's Phil doing when he's in the office and what's still doing when he's at home? And how do the other members of the team then work together to make sure that the days that we are in the office, because we've all made that effort to travel in at the cost, as you said, and the £4 cappuccino and the £12 sandwich and all that stuff, yet we then get into the office and all of us are on Teams calls all day. Now that is an abject waste of everybody's time.

Yes.

And there's not enough conversation, I don't think, and perhaps I'd be interested in your perspective on this, enough training for leaders around you need to have a conversation with your team about what you do. We need to be more planned in what we're doing, when we're doing it, and where we're doing it so that when we are together, we can make the most of that time together, that we're doing the stuff that needs us to be in the same room versus the training or the calls or the whatever that can be done on a Monday and a Friday at home. I think we're lacking upskilling leaders to be able to lead effectively in this new way of working?

Yeah, I think a couple of things. First of all, it's not just I'm working from home or I'm working in the office. What has changed fundamentally is how I work through the day. So within reason, I can set my own work schedule in a day. So I could get up early, I could do something, I can do some work, I can then deal with maybe my family situation, get everybody sorted, come back and do some work. And then I might go and do Pilates, and then I might do some more work, and I can sort my family situation out, then I can work again. So throughout the day, there's a flexibility of working which doesn't quite exist when you're physically in the office. So we've looked at productivity. And over the 6 years, I haven't had one client that's rang me and said, Phil, this has to stop. You know, we're not getting through the project work. We're not actually hitting our deadline. So, so that kind of proves that that level of flexibility is good. I think the issue around making best use of when you are physically in the office is around some level of rigor that says, you know, we will be in on these days. And that's not to say that everybody has to do Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Um, it might just be that my group agree that we'll do Monday, Wednesday, and we'll be flexible on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Um, but at least then we know that we're going to be together in the office and we could be much more productive. But at the same time, one of the other learnings is we do a lot of work on on Teams today. You know, it is sadly, it's the way that we're working today here. And, you know, understanding how to run Teams meetings and coming back to your point, you know, that learning, because quite often now we have hybrid Teams meetings, some people are physically in the room and some people are up on the screen. And often what happens is the people in the room forget about the people on the screen. And so they become disconnected. So it is, you know, there's discipline and ways of working that we all have to learn when we're actually doing that. But again, I couple it all with, you know, we still have to strengthen that connection with the company and with each other by putting effort into coming to central places at different times throughout the working year.

Yeah, yeah, I absolutely agree. I think we had an idea pre-COVID that that culture was a building, that our culture of organization was kind of ensconced in our bricks and mortar. Whereas actually now, we've realized that's not the case because you could have people at home, you could have people in India, you could have people on client site, you could have people in the office, people are all over the place. So actually, culture has become wherever our people are. And I wonder, as we look to the kind of the future of work, and I look to the future of our podcast episode, which is rapidly coming to a close, when we look toward the future of work, What do you think the big challenges are going to be when it comes to building strong and aligned cultures in organizations?

You touched on it at the beginning. There's always the chance that, you know, one of your, a lot of your people who are working outside of us, I mean, so we're a consultancy, they're with their clients, that they go native, they become more the client than they are Explio. And so that's something that we've always had to protect against. By ensuring we keep as much contact with everybody as is entirely possible. I think the other thing is it's not just flexible working now, it's geographic working. So today, you know, we're developing software for clients and the team could be here, could be in Romania, could be in India, could be in Portugal. And so you've got 5 different locations, 5 different time zones, and you know, how do you actually organize yourself such that, you know, you can do a stand-up at the beginning of the day, whatever the— whatever you decide is the beginning of the day, that's the point that you do it. Starting to develop ways of working that encompasses that geographic change, because that's one of the big things we're seeing. And I think before COVID everybody said, no, my project must be here in my office in Dublin. And now everybody says this is great, we can get access to different talent, more talent, you know, because the talent pool is now much, much wider. So as long as it's secure and it's safe, then, you know, the real benefit is that we've got access to a global talent pool of people and we can bring them to work. Every day of the week.

Yeah, and I think that for me, the word that I use most often is about being really specific with our culture and being really clear and intentional with the culture that we want to have and ensuring that we're clearly aligning people to that culture all the time, regardless of where they are. Country-wise, at home, wherever, it doesn't matter. But it's those norms and behaviors and systems and processes that we all share based on our values, which we never got to talk about, but we'll do that in another episode in the future. As long as we're all really clear on what those are and we're all held to account for them, for me, that's absolutely core.

Sure, sure.

We're at the end of our conversation, Phil. It has been great having you on. I've really, really enjoyed the conversation, as I said, and it's always really nice talking to people that have to live this day in, day out in organizations. So really appreciate your time and your candour. What I will do, actually, that article you said on loneliness, I might get you to send me the link to that and we'll put that in the show notes for listeners.

Okay, I'll dig it out and have a look for it.

Yeah, great. And what we'll do as well is if anybody wants to get in touch with you, we'll put your LinkedIn in the show notes as well down below. So for now, thanks so much for being on.

Thanks, Scott. Great to join.

Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please take 30 seconds to give us a quick rating and review wherever you're listening. It really does help. And to hear from other leaders in our podcasts, to read our blogs, or to find out more about the work that we do, please visit inspiringchange.ie.