Chief Culture Officer, Sanofi: How culture became our operating system for success

At pharmaceutical giant Sanofi, culture is not something that happens by accident. It is meticulously planned, carefully designed, and rigorously brought to life by senior executives and junior hires alike.

Raj Verma, Chief Culture, Inclusion & Experience Officer at Sanofi, has been leading these efforts for over five years and has seen Sanofi’s culture shape the organisation’s transformation, business strategy, and success story.

He speaks to HR Grapevine to set out the approach, from the power of leadership accountability to building a ‘Culture Wheel’…

What does organisational culture mean at Sanofi?

Culture has been one of the most defining enablers of our business.

We're continuing to evolve into a modern healthcare company that's focused on innovation, science, and most importantly, on our patients. And like many organisations, we also recognise that strategy alone is unlikely to get us there. What continues to fascinate me throughout this journey is just how much the transformation of Sanofi is personal before it becomes organisational.

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It's somewhat easy for us to change structures, processes, and strategies. But unless people believe in the ‘why’ and adjust how they work, how they collaborate, how they make decisions, and how they lead, cultural change just doesn't stick. My team's role has been to create the conditions for continual transformation by building culture as a system so its robust enough to ‘shape shift’ when needed because our foundations are solid enough.

It’s not work we could ever have done alone or with just a people and culture lens. It was a Sanofi-wide play co-created with and through our business.

We've focused on supporting our people so they feel empowered to challenge, to innovate, take ownership, to speak up, to bring their best selves to work every day – connecting their purpose with Sanofi’s purpose and if they can see themselves in the work that they do.

How has it enabled the organisation’s transformation and success story?

We've treated culture not as a programme or campaign, but as an operating system, embedding it into leadership expectations, talent decisions, communication, performance conversations, and everyday employee experiences. Culture is felt as a strategic asset that has helped us to strengthen engagement, double down on collaboration, and build an environment where it’s okay to fail fast.

That is what helps innovation to flourish, which is exactly what our patients want and need from us. My belief is that culture is how strategy feels to employees every single day. If they don't experience the transformation, they can't deliver it. Everything we do inside starts with the employee at the heart.

What is Sanofi’s Culture Wheel and how does it work?

I can remember my first conversation with my CEO at the time. We spoke about making sure that he set the tone from the top and that executive leaders owned the culture they wanted to permeate. Culture is created through a series of interconnected experiences that we as employees have every single day.

That's why we developed a Culture Wheel. It helped simplify culture into a set of practical levers that leaders can pull for themselves, including things like performance management, recognition, communication, employee voice, inclusion, learning, talent practices, wellbeing, health and safety, and workplace experiences.

Rather than talking about culture as an abstract concept, we've focused on the experiences that actually shape it. All of these things are, in my mind, levers that amplify your culture – it’s the pragmatism that works best.

Culture in Sanofi will not come through posters or campaigns. They are, of course, an enabling part, but culture will only be sustainable when the systems around people are reinforcing the behaviours that we want to see. If we want greater collaboration, we need to recognise it, we need to measure it, we need to talk about it, and we need to build it into expectations. Every lever has to work together, and this Culture Wheel has given us a common language and a practical framework for making culture everyone's responsibility.

I'm going to steal this line from a dinner conversation I had with Katarina Berg, who was CHRO at Spotify at the time: “Culture can't just be a vibe, it has to be a verb.”

You’re going to end up with a culture whether you want it or not, so you might as well design it rather than having it build up by default.