Grounding finance by amplifying culture

I recently connected with Carolyn Nash, Vice President of Finance Transformation and Operations at Red Hat, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise open source solutions. She’s attended the CFO of the Future Summit with Accenture and Harvard faculty in person, and participated in our Virtual Summit series earlier this year.

We had a fascinating conversation about all things Finance, and I’m thrilled to share some of it with you. Red Hat is so well known for its culture so I wanted to start there. In this video, Carolyn shares how the company and the finance team got grounded in culture during the pandemic period.

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Aneel Delawalla: I wanted to start and talk about the concept of culture and the culture that people are driving in their organizations. Culture has been a big focus of Red Hat, emanating from your open source focus to your open shift and to your open culture, even. How has that evolved in recent years? How has the pandemic influenced that? And Red Hat's broader transformation influenced that as well?

Carolyn Nash: Yeah, thanks Aneel. So culture is our thing. I mean it's something that really differentiates Red Hat, whether it be in our open-source development model, whether it be the way we run our company and the way we operate within our teams. I would say as I think about culture, I think about how in a couple of different veins, and you mentioned COVID and I think that's a really important place that I would say we have leveraged our culture to amplify how we operate and how we work in a very, very difficult time. And so when I think about COVID and I think about leveraging our culture, very quickly we knew that we had to reach out to our associates to hear what's going on, to see what was really impacting, not only their productivity but their well-being. So quickly, both as Red Hat, as well as in the finance organization, we took a leadership role in working with our associates to understand what was most important to them. It was quickly within a very short amount of time, we came up with the plan to have a one day per quarter off for the entire company, so a Red Hat recharge day. That was the voice of the team that came up to say, we just need a break and using my PTO isn't enough, because I know everything's going on, so an opportunity for all of us to step back and recharge.
As a finance organization, we also led the charge to provide all of our associates with a stipend. We're now in this new working environment where we realized these chairs don't feel quite as comfortable. Our setup isn't good and so we provided a stipend for people to do whatever it is they needed to, to make themselves more comfortable and more productive at work. And for me, that was our culture hard at work.

See more finance insights here.