7 Best Culture Practices for 2026 (and how to make them actually work)
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast On The Road, we sit down with Jorge Quezada, MBA (He.Him.His), Vice President, Culture & Performance at Granite Construction, to unpack what happens when culture stops being treated as a soft initiative and starts being run as a business driver.
Jorge explains why culture is the operating system of an organization, shaping how people think, act, interact, and bring the company’s mission, vision, and values to life every day.
He shares how Granite is updating its culture for the next 100 years by preserving what makes the company strong, diagnosing what needs to change, and creating the conditions for people to grow, adapt, and perform.
Most importantly, Jorge reveals why the future of culture belongs to leaders who stop copying best practices from other companies and start understanding what their own people, business, and operating system actually need.
🎓 In this episode, Jorge discusses:
How organizations can learn, unlearn, and relearn to stay relevant
How AI still depends on human adoption, better questions, and human thinking
Why culture should be treated as the operating system that drives performance
Why leaders need to diagnose their own culture before copying external best practices
Why unleashing human agency starts with challenging limiting beliefs and building confidence through
What if the future of work wasn’t more artificial?
What if it was more human?
On May 20, Workhuman Forum London brings the UK and Europe’s most forward-thinking CHROs, CPOs, and people leaders together at the London Hilton Park Lane for one defining day on trust, recognition, psychological safety, and leadership in the age of AI.
Because as AI accelerates, the real competitive edge is not just better technology.
It’s stronger cultures.
It’s leaders who can build trust when pressure rises.
It’s recognition that connects people to strategy.
It’s psychological safety that helps teams speak up, adapt faster, and perform through uncertainty.
And it’s human intelligence that gives leaders a clearer view of what is really happening inside their organisation.
You’ll hear from world-class thinkers and senior HR leaders including Rachel Botsman, Eric Mosley, Susan David, Ph.D., Tom Lee, and more, unpacking the practical strategies people leaders need now.
This is not another conference.
It’s a reset moment for HR leaders who know the next era of work cannot be built on automation alone.
00:11
Boy, welcome back to the show, my friend. It's good to be here. My goodness, four years? Dude, four years. The fact that you even remember the old podcast set.
00:21
It's crazy. No, you know what? Because it was funny because I remember during the holidays, right? And then I had just the audacity to ask you about what team you followed in football. And I'm like, none. None. And I'm like, wait a minute, you have a British accent. How could you do this? I'm a weirdo. Skateboarder, ice hockey, right? Everything but rugby, football, all the English ones I'm not interested in. Got it. It's got to be some sort of like extreme sport.
00:51
And I thought that that was the moment that we connected because of what we were doing at the time at Granite around diversity, equity, and inclusion, right? And what we taught people, right, about...
01:05
You can get someone, you can see someone, you can hear their accent, and our brains automatically, bless you, automatically start putting an image or a persona... Unconsciously. Unconsciously, and the reality is that there's more to us, right? 100%. Yeah, yeah. How have you been anyway? So, no, excellent. We're in a journey where I could tell you that...
01:27
physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, I've been asked to level up on a personal level. And so I'm really proud of the support that I've gotten in those four dimensions that I've been able to level up. So yeah, thanks for asking. How about you? You're looking good, man. Are you looking good? Yeah, trying. Protein, protein, man. High protein, no carbs? Yeah, low carbs, no breads, no pastas. It's killing me, but you know what? We're doing it. So you're one of the rare HR leaders that's actually taking care of themselves. Oh, my gosh. Well, I'll take it as a compliment. But last night, you know, it was a fun night at dinner.
02:02
But it was great because the folks here at WorkHuman did a nice job of accommodating the diet. So talk us through where you are now. Obviously, you've been helping Granite from an inclusive diversity work perspective into a more broader culture performance model. So what changed when the culture stopped being treated as a soft industry? Wow. Initiative and started being run as a business driver, which is kind of like when we first spoke of our goal. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting that you the way you positioned it. One, thank you for remembering the term inclusive diversity, because when I was brought to the company, we realized very quickly that the problem we were trying to solve was not just working, focusing on the few.
02:46
but expanding and thinking about the many. And at the time, the person Kyle Larkin now is our CEO. When I met with him, he asked me, he goes, you know what? It seems like what you're talking about is culture work. He goes, at the right time, we're going to bring that back. He goes, I don't know when it's going to happen, but we'll bring it back.
03:05
And so I could tell you that in the last year and a half,
03:09
It was a moment where he said, you know, I think we're ready to start talking about culture and performance. So in the phrasing of your question, the reason why I think when it stopped was when we realized that culture has always been an operating system.
03:25
and and and just like our phones if you don't update the operating system i like that you know what i'm saying yeah some some things will not work some of the apps will not work some of the initiatives won't take hold some of the engagement will not happen because we have to constantly um alvin toffler said this he goes the illiterate of the 21st century are not going to be the people that can't read or write it's the people that can't learn unlearn and relearn So if you think about it in the context of culture, in the OS system, we have to update that operating system. And now, what a better moment, right? With everything that's going around us to check into that operating system, do we have the right one in? So that's how I would tell you when we realize when that change is taking place. Talk us through the journey. It's been a journey, right? What's been some of the challenges on the journey?
04:20
You know, I think one of the challenges, and it's just like we started, is the biggest one is you think that you know what will work.
04:31
Right. And that is an inherent bias that we bring when you move from one company to another company. The second one is and we use this. It sounds a little crude, but there's a reality to it. You have to learn how to prepare the body to accept the organ. And what I mean by that is any time you're trying to introduce something new, you have to make sure that you create the right conditions for people.
04:57
to work whatever you're positioning. So one of the things, the challenges was coming in with, I couldn't do what I did at Northwestern Mutual at Granite. I couldn't do what I did at Kraft. You follow? So this means that best practices that lived in other companies, I couldn't take them. I couldn't come to a conference like this and go like, oh, we're going to try that and drop it in and expect the same results. It's a different culture, different people, different ways of looking at things. So what you have to do is you have to humble yourself and do that diagnostic literally to say to yourself, okay, what does granite construction need?
05:37
And I'm telling you that the majority of time,
05:41
All you have to do is update the operating system because we're a hundred year old company. We are a company who takes great pride in having that strength and legacy, strength in enduring values. But we also are looking for the next hundred years. So we're thinking like a startup. What are the things that we need to do from now moving forward? So, yeah. Practically, what does that look like?
06:04
How are you ensuring that you have a pulse on what's happening so that you know what to upgrade with? Yeah, you know, I would tell you that. So I appreciate the question because you want to go deeper. And I would tell you that COVID taught us a lot about who we are as individuals, how we treat others and what we expect from people and what people expect from us.
06:31
Right now, with all this talk of AI, let's say, I think we're starting to value us as humans more. We're starting to appreciate, and maybe it gets back to, you know how you say like, if you love someone, set them free, and if they're meant to be, they'll come back to you? Well, maybe we're in a moment where we hear all this thing about AI,
06:47
that we may be thinking like, I'm going to lose my job. We're thinking about, oh, it's going to eliminate this, it's going to eliminate that. And what we're realizing is we're peeling the onion and we're realizing, wait a minute, some of the stuff that's needed for AI to be successful, first of all, is my adoption.
07:03
It's my questions. It's my prompting of this thing in that capacity.
07:09
It's also telling us that I have this thing in my head called a brain, and it's needed to make this thing called AI work.
07:17
Humans are needed in this moment in time. And I think that's what we learned about working from home. That's what we learned about...
07:28
Conferencing conference calls before we used to have a speaker. Right. And then there was Skype. And then all of a sudden, within months, we had this new technologies coming up all over the place.
07:40
You know, we didn't even have we couldn't even put pictures or memes up. now we have gifts right like the technology has gone to another level where you're doing presentations and you could put your body in front of something i mean it's just phenomenal what the practicality looks like it actually stretch our ability to think of what's possible yeah um and so the practicality is from a human condition i think we we challenge ourselves to be better leaders
08:08
I was looking at some of the data and you cut retention by roughly 25% during COVID. From 25% to under 10%. So what changed?
08:25
So again, maybe let me circle back to what I said, right? Like we, we stepped back and actually did the analysis. Like, why are we losing people? And during COVID, right? You realize that there were people having this existential type of thinking of like, maybe I'm not at the place. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Um, there would, our, our company had, You know, we're a construction company, so there are people who, the majority of our workforce is paving roads, right? Is building things. So they're not in the office per se. Some of those folks had to go into work. They could not work from Brazil and do work, right? Or Mexico. So we had to think about how we would engage a workforce that was in the office, outside the office.
09:14
We had to think about how we recognize people, how we engage with them, how we talk to them. What did we value about them? That is, I think, the lesson that we learned. And then we started implementing things. And then I mentioned Kyle Larkin. It also came at a time when he took over. So he was in senior vice president. He takes over as CEO.
09:34
And he said, you know what? I think we have the potential to do these three things from a revenue, from a return to our investors. And he said from turnovers.
09:46
in order for us to be the company we want to be we got to retain the people we hire so that when we hire new people we're just growing and we're growing with the culture that we want to create yeah so that is i would tell you how we did it yeah so the good thing is you had to buy in from the top which helps it does help it does you know what that is true but when that happens exponentially um i think um Hardy is the last name. Dr. Hardy, I think of it. I think of the first name. But anyway, he wrote a book, 10X is Better Than 2X.
10:17
He 10X'd our thinking.
10:20
And by 10Xing our thinking, we then said, well, in order to hit that, we must do these things. Was it your thinking or your ambition?
10:29
Now we're getting into some neuroscience stuff, right? So I'll tell you. So my belief is this. Beliefs drive my values, drive my thinking, drive my emotions, my behaviors, and my results. So when you ask me that question and I respond, you're getting into neuroscience, right? My ambition lies in my mindset. And that's like if we're going to use an iceberg below the waterline, right? Yeah.
10:56
But I need to be aware that that's in your question, that it comes from me, like my agency to do that. So I could put 10x is greater than 2x in front of you, but you have to believe it. That's what I mean. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Because like sometimes we kind of put like handcuffs on ourselves. Correct. Artificial beliefs in what we can and cannot achieve or do or become, right? I grew up super, you know, my background, I grew up super poor, didn't have much. So I was always told like, you can't do this or you're like, you're always going to be poor or no.
11:32
Like, now I run my own business and I'm the CEO of an AI business. I never would have believed that, right? Yes, yes. At some point, I realized that I can't just wait around for people to give me permission. No. I just go, like, seek discomfort, push forward, fail forward, right? And that's kind of been the biggest, like, superpower and changed my life. Just that mindset shift unlock. Yes. One day, I was like, oh, like...
12:01
On the other side of failure is the magic. Correct. And my association with the word failure is now a healthy, positive, I love it. Yes. And you're getting into, there's some interesting conversations, right? Like if people think about Brahma, right? In Hindu, he's one of the gods.
12:24
And there's a story that's told that basically says that we all had this agency. We all were deities at one point, right? And then Brahma, we misused it. So Brahma said, let's hide it.
12:35
Have you heard this? No. So check this out. So what he says is he told his other people, his other gods, right? I'm going to like modernize it a little bit. He goes, hey, we got to hide this thing that they misused. So they said, let's put it in the highest peaks. And they're like, Brahma was like, no, they'll climb up and go get it.
12:55
In the deepest ocean, no, these humans will dive. I've seen it dive down deep and go get it. We'll dig it. No, they'll dig. He goes, give me a moment. I'll come back. He comes back and he says, I found out where we're going to put it.
13:09
because we're going to put it inside this. She was about to say that. You were about to say that? I was thinking that makes sense. You're going to put it inside them. So we're always on this journey, right? Joseph Campbell writes about getting on a path and all kinds of stuff. And he's right. If you're walking on a path and there's already path there, you're on someone else's path.
13:29
Make your own.
13:30
And that's the thing though, like organizations today or of yesterday, they were set up for you to walk the organization's path. Whereas where we're going now, when we remove hierarchy, we remove, you know, we move towards skills and tasks. Yeah. Now people...
13:47
can walk their own paths. Correct. It's not just straight up or side to side anymore. Companies that cracked the code on that, and this gets back to your earlier question of when did this happen, was we as a company realized that we were walking one path, but in order for us to go over here, we're going to have to walk a different path. And we just unleashed the individual agency and people. Let me say it that way. You're making me think now, but that's really it right there. People are comfortable walking a path because it's familiar. Correct. Right? And now that's where we're seeing some fear come from because people are like, okay, you removed a lot of my manual admin work using AI agents. Now what do I do? Yes. Because normally I came in and I had a series of tasks to complete and this is why I've been doing it. I know it. I'm confident. Correct. Now all of a sudden we're saying, hey, you need to be curious. You need to be a critical thinker.
14:43
You need to be solving problems. Yes. What are the right questions to ask? You need to have emotional intelligence and resilience. And they're like,
14:52
What is this? How do you measure this? So there's been people and you shared your story, right? There's been people because of limiting beliefs has always had that. But what happened is we've had either parents, mentor, whatever, tell us, no, it's not for you, not for you.
15:08
But now we have people who are like waking up to their true potential, their true purpose. And so what better way of making sure that that gets married up by having conversations like this and just acknowledging that we have what we need inside us. It's just whether we can unleash it. I think society in general doesn't do a great job of unleashing them, right? Like even growing up, I remember sitting next to my mom and my teacher while they're talking about how basically make it stupid I am. Like, it was really, it was awful. Like, Chris is struggling with rereading. He's got learning difficulties. He's going to be behind. And I'm obviously, like, now taking all of this on board and convincing myself that I can't read, I can't write. And I'm like, my negative self-talk, if that makes sense. Yeah. So I'd always say I struggle with this because I heard it, right? Yes. And then, like, at a certain point, I don't know what it was.
16:04
I was just like, that's not true. No.
16:07
Like why am I putting these like limiting beliefs? I've been carrying them around in my backpack. Well, I like that backpack. We like to use an analogy of a box. So when people see you not as a person, but as a thing, an obstacle or something that's irrelevant, they're treating you as a thing, right? Yeah. And so in that parent-teacher conference that we call it here in the States, you were in a box. And when you're in that box, all you could see or hear is you and the things around you. And we have to get people out of those boxes, right? To be more outward in their thinking, in their mindset. One of the questions I ask, maybe friends and family, but I think I need to ask my team about this. I say like, if you knew you couldn't fail, what would you do? Yes, it's a great question. And it's incredible when people tell you the ideas and you're like, wow, like you've had that ambition and a desire and you've never fell for it.
17:02
And one thing that they realized very quickly is all the things that were stopping them, they can do it.
17:10
And they've given themselves the first, like if the next question is, so what would be the first step for you to do that? And they, and the majority of time people say, I would do this. We'll go do that. Yeah. Right. I know. It's like, once you kind of think about that, like, because everyone's so worried about what their friends, family, even loved ones are going to think if they fail. Yes. That they don't do anything. Yes. They stay in that. And I'm like, and the reality is not to burst anyone's bubble. No one really is paying that much attention. No. Yeah, they call it fear of other person's opinions. I failed and I've built successful businesses. I've failed. I've had the highs and lows. No one remembers all the failures. Now, Chris, you have a podcast. It's so successful. I'm like, for the first 300 episodes, no one listened. It was just me in my room on Skype talking to people. Yes, yes. No one remembers those days. With the fireplace and the Christmas tree.
18:06
Yeah. Exactly. And here we are now at Work Human Life. Yeah, it's amazing. In person. In person, I know. We're connected on LinkedIn, right? Yeah, yeah. We're connected on LinkedIn.
18:17
It was really cool. Yeah, it's really surreal to be right here right now. I know. Paul, listen, before I let you go, is there anything we didn't speak about that we should have?
18:26
You know, I think one of the things that I'm learning in this journey of understanding culture is we have to be grounded. I would tell people...
18:37
Ground yourself on what definition around culture you want to talk about. You know, if you go into a room and you say culture is the worst behavior you're willing to tolerate, everyone's going to think about the negative. Yeah. We like to say that culture and Dan Coyle and Culture Code uses this definition. He talks about it's a set of living relationships working together to accomplish a shared goal. It's not what you are, it's who you are.
19:03
It's creating an operating system that allows you to have people think, act and interact in a way that lives the mission, vision and values of a company. And it may sound as I'm talking about it, having an out of body experience thinking, man, that was a good elevator pitch. I should write it down. But it's because we talk about it. over and over and over again.
19:27
It's how we think, act, and interact. It's not who we are, it's what we do. It's in the actions we take. It's in, once you eliminate that limiting belief, as you say it, and you acknowledge like, what would you do if failure was not an issue? It's that first step. Because everyone talks about culture, confidence, and the same kind of area. Confidence doesn't happen
19:50
because someone sprinkles pixie dust on you. Confidence happens is because you take action, you evaluate, you have an identity, and you do it again. And you build momentum, right? Build momentum. Now you're getting more endorphins. Yes. Yes. So that would be the thing that we, you know, we danced around it a little bit, but I would tell you that with intention, that's, I guess, what comes to mind for me. Yeah. Well, dude, I'm so happy to see you again. You, brother. It's so interesting. We're just going to do this. Let's not wait four years. No, we're not going to do that. And I wish you all the best until next week, man. Appreciate you.
Jorge Quezada, Vice President, Culture & Performance at Granite Construction.