Transmitting an Unwritten Culture: Hermès HR Leader Sharon MacBeath

Hermès is one of the world’s most admired brands, renowned for its exquisite craftsmanship — as exemplified by the iconic Birkin and Kelly bags. Hermès has also achieved remarkable long-term business success. Nearly two centuries after the company’s founding as a workshop to craft horse harnesses for European nobility, Hermès today ranks among the 50 most valuable companies in the world.

“What’s below the visible tip of the iceberg … the financial results and growth … [is a] very strong culture that’s been built up through time in a very consistent fashion,” according to Sharon MacBeath, group human resources director at Hermès. Employees agree. In our study of culture at more than 400 large companies, employees’ Glassdoor ratings of Hermès’s culture and values put the company two standard deviations above its luxury fashion peers in our rankings.

Hermès’s leadership is firmly committed to preserving the company’s corporate culture, especially as head count has doubled to nearly 24,000 employees over the past decade. “We do an annual risk mapping, and it’s always something that emerges quite high on our risk map — this fear of [cultural] dilution,” MacBeath noted. “How do we make sure, as we grow, that we don’t lose sight of the DNA of the company?”

The company’s approach to preserving its cultural legacy is rooted in its time-honored tradition of apprenticeship. Long-tenured leaders and employees pass on not only expertise but also social norms to new hires. MacBeath described this organic approach as finding ways “to bring people along without putting everything into systems.” Here, she shares some tactics on how Hermès instills its culture.

1. Experienced cultural values shape behavior.

When many leaders start scaling their companies, they begin by codifying a set of explicit core values. Hermès’s leaders, however, were reluctant to adopt “typical processes where you have workshops, you define what the common values are, you write them down, you define them, and you try to get people to behave in ways that are consistent with those,” MacBeath said. “[There was] fear about ‘If we try and put this culture into words, it might somehow get lost or the magic might disappear.’”

“What’s striking,” MacBeath observed, “is that if you were to go and walk around the offices here, and go down to the atelier [workshop] at [Rue du] Faubourg Saint-Honoré [in Paris] and then go into the store and speak to salespeople, you would immediately see quite a lot of consistency in the way people describe the culture. And why is that surprising, when we say it’s a strong culture? There’s actually nothing that’s written down. So our culture and our values are not on posters, on walls; they’re not in performance evaluations. The values are experienced.”

For most organizations, prioritizing and codifying core values is critical, to communicate expectations, reinforce social norms, and measure culture. Under certain conditions, however, leaders can trust that tacit values will be faithfully transmitted. Hermès illustrates the power of this approach and the prerequisites required for the apprenticeship model of cultural transmission to succeed.

2. Top leaders embody a long-term view.

Transmitting culture without codification or process depends on having top leaders who are steeped in the company’s legacy and committed to preserving it into the future. For Hermès, that continuity has come from six generations of family leadership. MacBeath noted that “as much as Hermès has become a global group and luxury brand, it’s also still a family business. We still have three family members in our executive committee … family members that are present and constantly reminding, telling the story of the past, how we got here.”

Leaders who personify the culture are more likely to make decisions shaped by core values. MacBeath recalled how Hermès executive chairman and family member Axel Dumas intervened systematically when employees “were tempted to compromise quality for quantity. … And [Dumas] came in and said, ‘We’re not doing this.’ And there are many much more detailed stories around those kinds of defining moments, where you could have nearly gone offtrack and things were brought back.”

A long-term orientation among leaders is critical to maintaining cultural continuity. “If you’re a CEO that signed up for a three-year mandate, it might make more sense to favor quantity over quality in the short term because the business opportunity is there,” MacBeath observed. “It’s only because you feel that sense of responsibility to the generations past that you remain — [and] the family remains — truly on track and aren’t led astray by other things that might sparkle or shine, or represent short-term reward.”

3. Middle managers transmit culture throughout the organization.

Middle managers play a critical role in reinforcing corporate culture, especially in organizations with thousands or tens of thousands of employees. One of MacBeath’s first initiatives after joining Hermès was a leadership program for senior managers called Leading With Art. “Leading With Art was a lot about dialogue with tradition,” she explained. “How can we stay within the culture of the company and at the same time make sure we’re moving forward, make sure we’re anticipating the way societal expectations and the world [are] changing?”

More than 100 alumni of the Leading With Art program will be trained to facilitate discussions with their teams to “pursue the conversation more deeply into the organization, with a view to continuing to transmit — to pass on — the culture, our values, [and] our ways of working to the people that have joined,” MacBeath said. “There’s more agility, I think, in counting on people than there is in counting on process and structure in times of rapid change.”

These leaders will structure their discussions around how Hermès’s values can help teams manage key tensions and trade-offs. As MacBeath explained, “We’re being confronted with apparently contradictory demands. … We have to [achieve] the quarterly results, but we also have to continue with our long-term strategy. We have to find local solutions, but we’re in a global organization. … We need to make sure we’re industrial and craftsmen at the same time. This is an opportunity to take some of those recurring themes and have the conversation around those.”

Leaders at Hermès, MacBeath noted, require a “high tolerance for ambiguity, since we’re always faced with these seeming paradoxes. And again, things are not written down, and things are not black-and-white. If you’re someone that likes your KPIs, you like your process, you want things to be done in a system, you might not be very happy here.”

4. Rituals and face-to-face interactions reinforce culture.

MacBeath emphasizes the importance of in-person interactions in transmitting Hermès’s culture to new hires during onboarding. “We have a program called Mosaic for newcomers … [at the] Cité des Métiers [in northern Paris], where we have our different métier [trade divisions] and atelier. … We have a space there which is reserved for organizing seminars and training, a bit like a campus.”

MacBeath also emphasized ongoing rituals for new hires that reinforce Hermès’s distinctive traditions. “We’ll also visit the Emile Hermès Museum, visit the collection, the conservatory, where we have all of these historic pieces. They’ll have a session where they’ll learn what we call the [saddle] stitch, [where] they’ll make a bookmark in leather [and] actually get to start to practice a craft,” MacBeath said. “All of these rituals, combined by storytelling and people coming together, are some of the … ways that we continue to pass on the culture without that being formatted.”

Hermès places a premium on in-person work to transmit culture. “We have very much a work-from-office policy,” MacBeath said. “Our craftsmen are here, our salespeople are here, but our digital, our coding craftsmen [software engineers], are here too. And that’s also part of the way we pass on the culture. You’re part of these rituals, like going to Lisbon for a three-day seminar, but you’re also part of the town halls or the coffee machine discussions … to continually pass on the culture of the company.”

5. Employees stay for the long haul.

The Hermès apprenticeship model involves both long-tenured employees who can transmit the culture and new hires who stay long enough to soak up social norms and expertise and pass them on to the next generation. MacBeath noted that “[one] thing about Hermès is that people typically don’t leave. … The groupwide turnover rate is 7%. Even in markets like the U.S., where retail is about 50% turnover, we’ve got a few percent. So people stay for a long time, which on one side is great for cultural transmission.”

High retention rates, MacBeath added, is “not so great if you’ve got the wrong person and they don’t want to leave the company. So we have to be attentive to that. That’s why [we do] the things we do early on in onboarding — to make sure we’ve got people that are in a good fit.” To further support the culture, Hermès also favors growing talent internally over hiring from the outside.

Want to hear more advice from MacBeath? Watch this conversation and the entire series on the CultureX YouTube channel, on Spotify, or on Apple Podcasts.