Building One Culture Across Global and Local Teams

Season five of CultureClub X powered by CultureMonkey opens with a challenge most engagement playbooks quietly skip past. How do you build one unified workplace culture when your people sit in nine countries, speak 10 languages, and mostly work on factory floors rather than at desks? Host Natalie Thomas kicks off the season with Heather Kane, senior manager of change management and employee engagement at Robertshaw.

Robertshaw Controls builds gas and water flow technology, and most homes in the United States and Mexico contain something the company made. It is a global business in the middle of a complete cultural transformation, with about 4,600 employees. Around 80 percent of them are in Mexico, and 80 percent are frontline workers.

Heather is a transformational change leader whose career spans Fortune 500 companies and startups across consumer goods, retail and manufacturing, including digital transformations, SAP rollouts and organizational redesigns that touched thousands of employees. In this conversation she lays out what it actually takes to address local challenges while building a unified global culture.

Why does engagement mean different things to different teams?

Heather's first point sounds obvious but rarely gets acted on. The visible differences, language and time zones, are only the surface of the problem. The daily work experience differs not just across countries but across teams, and a manufacturing floor feels nothing like an office.

That variation makes it genuinely hard to land on a common definition of any part of engagement. Robertshaw also works with languages that are less commonly used, which multiplies the difficulty. Before you can improve engagement, you have to accept that each audience experiences work, and therefore engagement, differently.

What happens when a core value does not translate?

Robertshaw ran into this while establishing its core values. One of them was going to be accountability, and the team discovered that in two of its countries the word did not even translate.

The lesson goes beyond vocabulary. A technically correct translation that nobody connects with is still a failure, so the team had to find a word that would actually work on the ground. Heather frames the deeper issue as one of respect: employees want to feel that the company understands them and their culture, not just their language.

The scale of the shift at Robertshaw is striking. Heather notes it is amazing to think how many years the company had communicated in English only, despite having just 200 employees in the United States. For a workforce that is 80 percent Mexico-based, changing that default was foundational.

What keeps frontline employees disconnected from company values?

Heather boils the barriers down to two pieces: direct access and relevance. Without direct access, a message has to cascade from corporate to the VP, to the manager, to the supervisor, and only then, hopefully translated along the way, does it reach the frontline worker.

Direct access gives employees a choice. They will not want to see everything, but they can look things up independently, and the company can push information straight to them. Relevance is the second filter. People may show up for the big global meeting or the new initiative once, but they only keep coming back if what they find relates to their actual work.

What makes a communication system feel fair and inclusive?

Robertshaw has been rebuilding its communications around a set of must-haves, starting with an intranet that works without an email address. Mobile access matters most in a workforce where 80 percent are frontline: anyone, anywhere in the world, should be able to reach company information from a phone.

Multilingual translation is the next layer, and Heather is pragmatic about leveraging AI for it. Less commonly used languages will not have strong coverage in large language models, but she treats that as a starting point rather than a blocker. Locally focused content then ensures people see and hear what is relevant to where they are and what they do.

The final piece is showing that feedback goes somewhere. Heather describes a deliberate habit of reminding employees that the engagement surveys happened, the feedback was heard, and specific actions are the response. That visible follow-through is the heart of a working employee feedback loop, because it earns the next round of honest input.

Why does employee input so rarely become real change?

This is the episode's cold open and its sharpest insight. Change happens one person at a time, and at Robertshaw's scale that means thousands of individual decisions spread across cultural, linguistic and role differences.

Heather argues most organizations fail here because they treat audiences too broadly. What matters to a headquarters office worker in Chicago is totally different from what a frontline worker in Mexico cares about, and translation alone does not close that gap. Plant workers want to know what is happening in their local plant that week, not the corporate message.

Each person then has to move through a change process: understand why the new behavior matters, learn how to do it, and have it reinforced until they fold it into their daily routine. Treating everybody as Mexico or the United States, or as operations versus finance, is not enough. Breaking audiences down and equipping managers to focus the message is what actually drives change.

How does technology level the playing field for global listening?

Asked how managers can understand what culture feels like on the ground when teams operate so differently, Heather is direct about what made it workable at Robertshaw.

QR codes and easy access mean a survey can reach a frontline worker as readily as an office employee, and Heather says the team has been really excited by the response. Translation works in both directions: questions reach employees in their own language, and open comments come back translated so managers can act with their global teams.

For a distributed, largely deskless workforce, that is exactly the job a mobile-first pulse survey tool exists to do. It removes the email and desktop assumptions that quietly filter out frontline voices.

Better communication vehicles also feed the other direction. Heather's team can now have more direct conversations with employees, sharing what is changing and relaying the message with a local twist. Without those pieces, she says plainly, the transformation just would not be possible.

Will people keep up with the pace of workplace technology?

Heather's one caution is not about the tools but about the humans using them. Change is individual, and so is technology adoption. Phone access is no longer the worry, but even simple analytics can be complex for people who are not used to working with them.

For leaders investing in engagement analytics, that gap is the real constraint. The platforms can already collect, translate and report faster than teams can absorb, so helping people learn to use the outputs is part of the rollout, not an afterthought.

What this conversation means for employee listening

Every thread in this episode comes back to listening. Direct access is listening infrastructure, multilingual translation is listening across cultures, and closing the loop on survey feedback is proof that listening leads somewhere.

Heather's experience also shows that listening at global scale is an equity question. When 80 percent of a workforce is frontline, a listening program that assumes email addresses and desks quietly excludes most employees. Meeting people on their phones, in their language, with content about their own plant is what makes every voice count.

Natalie closes the season opener by reminding listeners that engagement is not a one-size-fits-all strategy: it is layered and evolving, reflecting both local realities and the broader culture a company aims to build.

For teams starting that journey, Heather's advice reads like a practical map. Understand your audiences, give them direct and relevant access, respond visibly to what they tell you, and let managers carry change forward one person at a time.