Organon chief communications officer Wendy Lund talks about the ins and out of building a company culture in the latest “PR’s Top Pros Talk” video interview with Doug Simon.

“We started with ten thousand team members, ten thousand employees,” Lund says about Organon, a company focused on healthcare for women which spun off from Merck last year. “That’s a wonderful opportunity when you're building a culture.”

“I think there's probably two challenges that have probably been most prevalent,” she tells Simon. “The first, of course, being COVID… Folks from around the world, whether they're essential workers in manufacturing plants to folks that are behind a desk, have really done an amazing job in terms of looking for ways to connect to each other and be together.”

“We know that we've been any different than any other company in terms of getting together,: Lund says. “We’re not hiding behind screens.”

The second was “setting up a brand new culture in the midst of bringing 85 percent of the people over from another culture. I had worked with so many people at Merck who came over.” Lund says that “people have just been amazing, really embracing this vision that we have around women and their everyday health.”

Lund talks about her strong connection with Organon’s vision. “One of the reasons I joined Organon was this deep commitment to putting women at the center.”

She also cites the importance of listening to the women that the company serves. “Our whole platform around our launch was all about listening,” she says. “That's really where we focused our attention, launching a commitment to women. And that was basically communicated through all our various stakeholders.”

Organon’s vision has also “played a major role in recruiting staff, keeping staff and just building the culture that we live in.”

After having held CEO roles at such agencies, GCI Health and Publicis, Lund says that “on the client side, you go so much deeper. So it's really important that as clients, we help explain to agencies exactly what we're experiencing, trying to create that connective tissue, but also creating a little bit of empathy.”

She also says that “clients sometimes tend to think that agencies just wake up in the morning and they have this great huge burst of creative ideas. And, you know, it's a process. It's a process to come up with great thinking. It's a process to come up with creative. It's a process to execute.”

Because of that, clients need to be aware of “having the patience and giving agencies the space to really make sure that they put everything in place.”

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