What does it mean to revolutionize a company’s culture? Gerdau, one of the leading long steel producers in the Americas, found that it took more than a few surveys or workshops to change their company for the better.
Caroline Carpenedo, head of corporate HR at Gerdau, spoke about the company’s transformation at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference. The evolution, Carpenedo explained, started back in 2014 after realizing that the 113-year-old company could not revise its business strategies without changing its culture.
After conducting internal surveys with all its employees, including the 5,000 workers in leadership positions, Gerdau began to envision what the company should be going forward — a company dedicated to a diminished office hierarchy, open dialogues between leaders and teams and empowering raw talent from all walks of life.
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“We changed our office to share an open space because we used to have rooms for directors,” Carpenedo said. “We took that out so all the directors and leadership, even the CEO, sit together.”
Gerdau’s leadership encountered even more changes, as the company enrolled leaders in cultural coaching and workshops. For those who were deemed unable to adapt to the new reality Gerdau wanted for the company, they no longer served in those positions. In order for change to be truly visible, Gerdau required leaders to act as role models for the evolving company culture.
“I think one of biggest challenges was to change those leaders,” Carpenedo said. “At some point, we changed around 30% of our leadership in order to put the right people in the right position.”
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As for employees, Gerdau strived to create work-life balance. The company implemented more flexible work hours, added psychological support, loosened its dress code and got rid of general competency models. An employee’s performance expectations are now based on developing their unique talents and skills.
The impact of these changes was starting to be visible by 2016, and the company took bi-monthly confidential “pulse checks” to survey its community after promotions or changes in leadership. That helped identify additional weak spots within the company culture.
“One thing that was very important for us in 2017 is that we realized that we would not have the openness we wanted without bringing more diversity to our company,” Carpenedo said. “We engage more than a hundred employees to work together on a process to bring more diversity to our teams.”
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Just this year, Gerdau launched its “Talent Bank” in partnership with TODXS, a non-profit startup that works to ensure LGBTQ+ inclusion in society, in an effort to encourage a more inclusive recruitment process. By 2025, Gerdau wants 30% of its leadership positions to be filled by women. A 2020 study by Thomas and Women in Manufacturing estimated that only 25% of manufacturing leaders are women, at least in the U.S.
Gerdau is motivated to continue growing as a leader in not only steel production but inclusive and thoughtful corporate culture. This process begun seven years ago, centered in Gerdau’s San Paola headquarters and has since made its mark in its other Latin and North American offices. As of now, Gerdau’s development is aligned with answering this overarching question:
“What was the legacy we wanted to leave the world?” Carpenedo said. “If our company did not exist anymore, would the world miss us?”
