“For years, I had a front row seat for how lack of culture or toxic culture can have an incredibly negative impact on an organization. The seat that I had was defending organizations in the court of law, in front of judges and juries,” said Elaine Becraft, the head of human resources for Siemens Healthineers, a branch of Siemens that makes the machines that carry out a lot of the diagnostic blood and urine testing around the world. She learned that the distance from no culture to toxic culture isn’t very far.

Becraft, a lawyer by training, was no longer interested in playing defense as problems materialized, nor did she want to lead the clean-up crew following a culture-related disaster. She wanted to be proactive in creating a motivating and inclusive culture, so she joined HR. “I felt like we could do better.”

I interviewed Becraft for a fireside chat during From Day One’s September virtual conference on creating a healthy and durable culture. She told the story of how the company upgraded its company culture, and instituted processes to make it last.

How to Rewrite Company Culture–And Make It Stick

If Becraft was to avoid playing defense or repeating post-incident disaster relief, she knew that Siemens Healthineers had to upgrade its culture: to state its purpose, name its values, and identify the behaviors that reinforce them. But where to begin?

“So often you see companies where it’s top-down: Maybe somebody in the C-suite is in charge of developing culture, or the CEO says, ‘I’ve got this great idea, let’s just run with it.’ We went about it a little bit differently.” Becraft is responsible for 15,000 employees in more than 60 countries; to change the culture, she needed buy-in from more than just the C-suite. So she found high-potential talent much lower in the organization and brought them in to debate the purpose and vision for the company.

Ultimately, they needed to arrive at something that people would enthusiastically adopt, that “when somebody says, ‘Why do you work for Siemens Healthineers? Why are you excited to be there?’ is the kind of rallying cry that gets employees really excited.” They arrived at this: Pioneer breakthroughs in healthcare for everyone, everywhere, sustainably. That was step one.

Step two was identifying the company’s values: Listen first, win together, learn passionately, step boldly, and own it. They deliberately wrote them in the understood first person–that is, “I” and “we” statements–“so my team can come together and talk about whether we are exhibiting these values. At the end of each year in my performance review, I have to talk about whether I’m exhibiting these values.”

It takes more than a memo from the top to spread the culture and its reinforcing behaviors throughout a global organization. To grow culture rhizomes–a live system that perpetuates a healthy culture season after season–find the influencers. “Sometimes the influencers are obvious in the org chart, they’re at the top, but sometimes they’re not as obvious, and you have to get to know who’s going to carry your message because they believe in it too.”

If the company was to reinforce and reward employees who embody the company purpose and values, then they’d have to reinstate formal performance reviews, which had been retired almost a decade ago, long before Becraft arrived.

Of course, change management is easier imagined than done. When leaders told her they wanted a formal mechanism to hold their teams accountable to the new values, Becraft assumed they were asking for performance reviews. It was a humbling experience for the new HR head.

“I left out of the gates with my team full of gusto to make this happen,” she said. “But a lot of people in the organization resisted the idea of reintroducing performance ratings.” The strongest resistance came from HR teams. “I thought, they just don’t get it. For 30 seconds, I allowed myself that awful thought. Then I realized that I don’t get it. These are the individuals who, eight years prior, had been the face of this radical evolution revolution to get rid of performance ratings, and now I was asking them to do something different that could be perceived as failure.” She had to slow down and convince the HR teams the idea was worthwhile.

Despite the good and necessary attitude change, Becraft wishes she hadn’t let the naysayers have so much of her attention. “At one point, a senior leader said to me, ‘Why are you trying to win every single person over with this? You never will.’” At a certain point, you have to decide what you’re going to do, then do it. There will always be someone who refuses to change their mind.

“It’s not possible–and it’s not even appropriate–to strive for one culture, especially in a global organization like ours,” she said, reflecting on the enterprise-level change. “But our common language has really helped us to be consistent. We have our purpose. We know why we jump out of bed, or at least why we log in, in the morning. We are there to impact patients in a positive way. We also have the wording, the vernacular, the phraseology that we use in our values. We practice them with each other, and that really helps.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.