How an Iconic Brand Cultivates Its Workplace Culture for Modern Times

BY Angelica Frey | October 05, 2023

“I am in service of Main Street, not Wall Street,” said Christine Kinahan, Welch’s chief people officer. Kinahan was interviewed by Callum Borchers, workplace columnist for the Wall Street Journal during the opening fireside chat of From Day One’s Boston conference.

Kinahan became Welch’s chief people officer after almost 15 years at Schneider Electric, and a year-long stint at product design company Shark Ninja. “When Welch’s came knocking, I had no idea what a cooperative was. I learned it was owned by 700 families.” This caused a drastic shift in mindset, but Kinahan is used to shifting gears.

Kinahan is a polymath in the HR space. She has a master’s degree in political science from Villanova University, work experience wherever Schneider took her, including Rhode Island, Tennessee, Shanghai, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Southern France, and is certified to drive a forklift.

Moving between states, countries, and continents taught her how different cultures approach work. She also came to understand the frustration frontline workers experienced when their bosses lacked understanding around what they do. “That’s the perfect case of why I learned how to drive a forklift,” she said to Borchers. “We were having so many issues in attracting and retaining talent and getting them to understand the test–you have to take a test for PIT (powered industrial truck). We were struggling with the recruiters on how to bring people in quickly.” The best way to understand this gap was to learn the skills that were a pain point.

Kinahan and Borchers kicked off the event at the Artists for Humanity Center in Boston

Welch’s is still dealing with talent shortage. “I think the talent shortage is still very real. We’ve been slow to adapt, we have to change the mindset of hiring managers to skills-based hiring more, lowering requirements more, investing in L&D more. I want to see more investment in technical schools,” she continues. “You don’t need the classic credentials if you have the requisite skills.”

Kinahan recommends starting by understanding who your hiring managers are, and if they’re trained to hire correctly. What are the cultural differences in your company, from a value perspective, that you need to work out very quickly? She endorses the Who hiring method, saying it has helped her understand who people are.

The hiring process moved to a scorecard model, which entails the core competencies, the values, and what’s needed for the job. “I tend to build a scorecard for very critical roles,” she says, acknowledging that it’s labor-intensive. She then expands it with the following criteria: What are we able to coach? What can be seen as a growth area? What are we able to accept that this candidate may not change in that area? “We’re hiring full-blown adults that have already materialized into certain behaviors that we might not be able to coach out,” she reasons. “There has to be that acceptable threshold.”

A good start is accepting that making everybody happy is impossible, and adaptability is key. “Equity is so important, and taking the time to really listen, it’s important for us as leaders to be there and it’s important to show gratitude and appreciation to those workers who have to be on the line,” she said.

“We’re also responding to the market of employees. It’s more of a gig economy, and some don’t want to work 12 months, some just want to do 8 months. We bring seasonal workers in, from a business perspective. Without that ability to adapt, we would be struggling for sure.”

Still, she hasn’t felt this energized in quite some time. “Yesterday we spent all day with our sales team. We had about 30 people of all different levels, talking about what we wanted to focus on for the next few years—we wouldn't have been able to do that as effectively in a hybrid environment,” she told Borchers. “There were so many of those water cooler conversations, so many opportunities for us to get consensus and alignment,” she said. “We’re a CPG company, we have to be there to test it, see it, make it happen.”

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Boston and Milan.

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