Culture Building Strategies with Bluebird Bio’s Andrea Walton

Better People Podcast

In this episode, bluebird bio’s Chief People and Culture Officer Andrea Walton talks about the different strategies to build and maintain a company’s culture, how to keep your employees mission-focused, and the best practices for achieving a strong DEI strategy.

Andrea Walton is the Chief People and Culture Officer at Bluebird Bio and has over two decades of experience in HR.

Andrea is also the Founder of the Concrete Rose Foundation and has a proven ability for helping provide and support the vision in steering organizations through periods of organizational change and high growth. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Better People:

• Different cultural perspectives between large and small companies.
• How to keep your employees mission-focused.
• Strategies to build and maintain a company’s culture.
• The DEI strategy in the biotech field.
• Best practices for achieving a strong DEI strategy.
• Implementing development opportunities and succession plans for new employees.
• Managing your career while being in an abusive relationship.

Resources:

• bluebird bio
• The Concrete Rose Foundation
• All The Smoke
• National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
• MidAtlantic Employers’ Association (MEA)

Connect with Andrea Walton:

• LinkedIn

Connecting with Holly DePalma:

• LinkedIn

Quotables:

• 8:25 - “What I love about smaller organizations that I’ve worked for is that you get to know everyone you get to know who sits where you get to know their names, their families, what motivates them so as much as large companies were really my foundation I’ve come to really appreciate the proximity that smaller companies give you when it comes to culture and culture building and team building with our employees.”
• 13:40 - “We know where we are in BioTech that people of color, that’s an obvious gap, and then when we drill down more African American and LatinX and so what we’ve done is created KPI’s and targets to help us close gaps specifically around those groups so when it comes to talent acquisition we’ve just partnered with a great organization to help us launch our first formal internship program that focuses on people of color because I want us to build an organic pipeline of entry-level folks that can grow into the organization.”
• 17:04 - “There can only be so many people on succession but you can develop everybody and so it’s about creating depth and breadth of experiences, it’s not just succession that's a part of it but what type of developmental programming are you establishing within your organization?”
• 21:53 - “I don’t believe in work-life balance anymore I believe in work-life integration because it’s impossible I think to be able to do both 100 percent of the time there’s just no way.”
• 24:30 - “During the pandemic domestic violence actually increased and we also know when a woman decides to leave and there are men in those situations too but when a woman decides to leave that’s the most dangerous time for her to leave and so to your point the pandemic really bought a lot of that ugliness up to the surface.”