Every organization says culture matters.
But ask people what it actually means, and the answers get fuzzy.

Is culture:

Culture isn’t a deck.
It isn’t a slogan.
It’s the sum of everyday behaviours - especially when no one is watching.

And here’s the real challenge for HR 👇
We experience culture deeply, but we rarely measure it clearly.

With the automobile sector moving full throttle into an electrified, automated, and AI-driven future, an interesting question that crops up in one's mind is what HR for the sector might hold in store in the next five years. This was discussed recently in a Zimyo podcast interview with Vikram Singh, Chief General Manager-HR of Prem Motors. He shared useful insights on how to take HR along with industrial transformations. 

According to him, the answer is in real-time with changes that are unfolding within the HR domain, including moving from departmental firefighting activities into a new paradigm focused on "Workforce Orchestration" – including anticipating skill gaps, speeding up hiring, managing multigenerational physical and digital workforces, along with use of  AI for smarter decisions." 

Here, Zimyo is leading by not only being a growth partner, providing industry best practices but also investing in AI, automation, and real-time intelligence to help you make your decisions quickly.  

As witnessed through the journey of Prem Motors, the automotive leaders of tomorrow will not only be building better vehicles but also stronger and future-ready workforces with HRs emerging as an authentic engine of growth.   

Long before “culture” became a leadership buzzword, Dr. Udai Pareek was already studying it with rigour.

Dr. Udai Pareek was one of India’s foremost thinkers in Human Resource Development and Organizational Behaviour, and a pioneer in helping HR understand culture scientifically.

He believed HR had a much bigger role than policies and processes.

His ideas quietly reshaped how HR thinks about:

His message to HR was clear: If culture shapes behavior, HR must learn how to observe and diagnose it - not just talk about it.

Dr. Pareek’s work reminds us that:

To make culture observable, he did something rare.

He gave HR a framework.

Dr. Pareek introduced OCTAPACE to describe an organization’s ethos - how it truly feels to work there.

OCTAPACE looks at culture through eight lived values:

Frameworks create understanding.
But HR needs actionable insight.

That’s where EngageWith, in collaboration with NHRDN, stepped in - building an OCTAPACE-based culture survey, rooted in Dr. Pareek’s original framework.

This survey helps HR teams:

👉 Explore the OCTAPACE Survey here:

Here’s something I’ve learnt the practical way.

Most companies don’t build culture.
They inherit it - from leadership behaviour, pressure moments, and the things they choose to ignore.

We like to say, “Culture is strong here.”
But strong for whom?
And visible where?

Because I realized that culture isn’t what I would say in town halls.
It’s what happens when targets are missed.
When someone disagrees with you.
When doing the right thing is inconvenient for the management.

As founders and HR leaders, we sense these patterns instantly.
But sensing isn’t the same as understanding.

If we can’t name and measure our culture clearly, we can’t shape it deliberately.

And that’s exactly why this matters so much.

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If you’re in HR today, you’re probably juggling trust issues (the workplace kind), encouraging people to experiment without breaking things, and giving autonomy without losing alignment.

When you zoom out, all of it points to one thing: culture.

And culture needs language. It needs clarity. It needs intention.

That’s what Dr. Udai Pareek’s work reminds us of.

At The Shape of Work, we’re just here to make that culture conversation a little clearer - and a lot more actionable. See you soon.

-Team TSOW