Personal and Business Competencies / Management Skills

Organizational Culture for HR and Managers — People Decisions Workshop

A four-hour workshop on how everyday people decisions build organizational culture — even when nobody plans it that way. The starting point is a case study in which participants make a hiring decision under time pressure and then defend it aloud in front of the group. The workshop ends with a team design of three concrete HR interventions, with no generic slogans about openness and collaboration. The group is made up of HR professionals and managers from DIFFERENT organizations, so the same dilemma leads to different decisions, and the differences in reasoning become the material for analysis.

One decision, the whole culture

Friday, 4 p.m. On the desk lies the application of someone who knows the company, has the experience and could start almost immediately. The team wants to hire them. Their direct manager is delighted. The competencies match. The recruitment process is essentially complete.

There is just one problem: there is no certainty that this is the right person. And there is almost no time left to decide. What do you do?

This is the starting point for a workshop in which HR professionals and managers step into the role of people making decisions that affect not only individual employees but the future of the entire organization. Every people decision sets in motion more than an HR process. It sends a signal to the team. It reinforces certain behaviors. It creates a precedent. Sometimes it grows the organization, and sometimes it quietly cements what has long needed to change. And that is exactly how organizational culture comes about.

How this workshop differs from training on company values

The EITT catalog already includes a full-day course on defining, communicating and embedding company values. This workshop does something different and deliberately narrower:

The starting point is a single people decision, not a set of values. We work backwards from effect to cause — from one concrete choice to the mechanism that cements it.
The decision is made under time pressure and defended aloud in front of the group. This is not a paper case analysis, but practice in reasoning with incomplete information.
The group comes from different organizations. Divergence between participants’ decisions is the teaching material here, and it cannot be reproduced within a single company’s team.
The finale is a design task, not a declaration — teams design three concrete HR interventions, with no slogans about openness, collaboration and engagement.
Four hours, not a full day. The workshop is scoped for one pass through the complete cycle: experiment, decision, mechanism analysis, intervention design.

How we work

No lecture on definitions. A case study, decision-making under pressure, comparing perspectives, consequence analysis and solution design. The diversity of organizations represented by participants makes it possible to see how the same problem can lead to entirely different decisions — and how much a company’s culture is revealed by the arguments used to justify them.

Because organizational culture is not what we wrote down in the strategy. It is what people learned from our decisions.

Benefits

A new perspective on the culture-shaping role of HR and leaders
The ability to see the long-term consequences of everyday people decisions
Tools for identifying gaps between the declared and the actual organizational culture
Hands-on experience analyzing a complex business dilemma
Ideas for concrete HR interventions that can shape behaviors and collaboration standards

Who is this training for?

HR professionals and HR team members

Managers who make people decisions

Team leaders responsible for recruitment and development

Professionals combining an HR role with a managerial role

Training program

A short experiment opening the workshop
What organizations say they value, and which behaviors they actually reward
The gap between declared values and the values readable from people decisions

A company case study — the candidate, the team, its history and the hiring circumstances
A decision made under time pressure
Defending your own decision in front of the group
Competing interests, incomplete information and consequences that are not obvious at first

A leader who wants to grow the organization while daily routine consumes their attention
What they delegate, what they turn a blind eye to, whom they reinforce
Building a map of the leader's influence
How seemingly minor choices change the dynamics of an entire team

Organizational culture beneath the surface of declarations
A company that declares innovation but chooses safety
Declared autonomy without handing over responsibility
Which behaviors we teach people without realizing it

Revisiting the opening decision from the perspective of the organization's future
Whom we attract, whom we develop, whom we allow to grow
Which leadership patterns we support
Recruitment, succession and employee development as culture-building tools

The final team challenge
Designing three concrete HR interventions for the analyzed case
Specific decisions, behaviors, rules and consequences instead of declarations

Comparing solutions across teams
Exchanging experience between representatives of different companies
Choosing one mechanism to examine in your own organization

Delivery Methods

On-site

Direct contact with trainer and group
Intensive hands-on workshops
Networking with other participants
Full focus on learning

Training Topics

Frequently asked questions

How long is the workshop?

The workshop runs for four hours and covers seven program blocks — from the opening experiment to comparing solutions across teams.

Who is this workshop for?

For HR professionals and managers from different organizations. The diversity of companies represented by participants is part of the method, not a coincidence — it shows how the same problem leads to entirely different decisions.

Is this a lecture on definitions of organizational culture?

No. We work through a case study, decision-making under pressure, comparing perspectives, consequence analysis and solution design.

What do participants take away?

A new perspective on the culture-shaping role of HR and leaders, tools for spotting gaps between declared and actual culture, hands-on practice analyzing a complex dilemma, and ideas for concrete HR interventions.

Is there one correct answer during the workshop?

No. The case study is built so that no single answer is obvious — there are competing interests, incomplete information and time pressure. What we analyze are the arguments participants use to justify their decisions.