Merary Soto-Saunders is the Managing Director and Head of Human Resources at CVC Credit Partners, a leading investment management firm with roughly $29 billion in assets under management. Over 17 years she has led HR functions in finance and tech organizations operating in 27 countries across North America, South America, Africa, and Europe, designing and managing HR functions that are truly global. Her work spans performance management, organizational design, talent acquisition, compensation planning, and crisis management.
This Reimagining Company Culture conversation focused on what makes internal culture work at global scale. Most companies struggle to maintain consistent culture across geographies; Merary walked through the operating practices that hold it together when the company spans dozens of countries with different labor norms, languages, and management traditions.
The synthesis below pulls in research and field practice from People teams running similar work today.
Why Global Culture Is Mostly an Operating Problem
Companies usually frame global culture as a values problem: how do we get everyone aligned around the same principles? The framing is incomplete. Global culture is mostly an operating problem: how do we run consistent practices across geographies while respecting local context? The values are easy to publish; the operating discipline is what makes them real in country 17 of 27.
McKinsey research on high-performing cultures found that companies in the top quartile of culture deliver returns to shareholders 60 percent higher than the median. The pattern across global companies in that top quartile is consistent operational practice, not consistent talking points. The talking points are usually similar across companies; the operations are not.
Merary’s framing pushes the discipline to where it actually lives: in performance management cycles, compensation reviews, manager training, and case handling. Get those consistent, and the culture follows.
What Global Culture Discipline Looks Like
How do you build consistent culture across countries?
Standardize the principles, localize the practice. Organizational culture frameworks describe what stays consistent (values, expectations of behavior, accountability standards) while local teams own how those principles show up in their context.
How does performance management vary globally?
Performance management practices vary in cadence, formality, and feedback style across geographies. The principles (clear expectations, frequent feedback, calibrated decisions) stay constant; the format adapts to local norms.
What Actually Works in Global HR Operations
Build a strong HRBP layer
HR business partners are the connective tissue of global HR. Strong HRBPs translate global strategy into local execution and surface country-specific signal back to central HR. Weak HRBPs become bureaucratic intermediaries that slow everything down.
Standardize tooling, especially for case handling
Centralized HR case management is one of the highest-impact tooling investments for global companies. Without it, every country runs its own version of intake, investigation, and resolution, which makes consistency impossible.
Treat change management as core HR discipline
Change management is constant in global organizations. Reorgs, market shifts, regulatory changes, and leadership transitions happen continuously across countries. Companies that build change management capability into the HR function adapt faster and lose less in the transitions.
Where Employee Relations Fits in Global Culture
ER is where global culture either holds together or fragments. Cases handled differently in different countries signal that the stated commitment to consistency is theater. Companies running mature company culture programs build ER infrastructure that produces consistent outcomes across geographies while respecting local legal context.
How global ER supports cultural consistency
Deloitte’s 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey shows that 86 percent of Gen Z and 89 percent of millennial employees consider purpose key to workplace satisfaction. Global ER systems that produce consistent outcomes regardless of country signal that the company actually means its values, which is one of the most credible cultural commitments a global employer can make.
Frequently Asked Questions About Global Internal Culture
How do you maintain culture across multiple countries?
Standardize the principles and the operating practices that reinforce them; localize the specific implementation. The pattern works across investment management, tech, manufacturing, and most other industries that operate at global scale.
What are the biggest pitfalls of global culture work?
Treating culture as a communications campaign, ignoring local norms, and underestimating how much consistent operations matter. Most global culture failures trace back to one of these three.
How does global HR handle compensation differences?
Compensation philosophy stays consistent (pay equity within bands, market competitiveness, performance differentiation); compensation specifics vary by country (statutory benefits, currency, market norms). The philosophy is what employees notice; the specifics are what HR teams operate against.
What role does the HRBP play in global culture?
The HRBP is the cultural translator. They make global strategy real in their country and surface country-specific reality back up. Strong HRBPs are the highest-impact hire in global HR teams.
How do you handle cultural differences in feedback styles?
Set principles centrally (clear expectations, frequent feedback, dignity in delivery) and let local teams calibrate the specific style. The companies that try to enforce a single feedback style globally produce friction and rarely improve outcomes.
How does global HR support new market entry?
New market entry is one of the most predictable failure points in global HR. Compliance, payroll, benefits, and ER infrastructure all need to be ready before the first hire signs. Companies that treat market entry as an HR project (not just a business development project) avoid the early missteps that turn into multi-year compliance issues.
How does global culture work integrate with mergers and acquisitions?
M and A integration is where global culture gets stress-tested. McKinsey research on high-performing cultures reports that 70 percent of transformations fail and that culture is the leading cause. Global integrations succeed when the acquiring company runs an explicit cultural integration plan with the same rigor as financial integration, and they fail when culture is treated as a soft topic that will work itself out.
One practical move that keeps global culture honest is exchange programs across geographies. Sending HRBPs and managers across countries for short rotations builds the cross-cultural muscle that no training program can produce. The investment is meaningful, but the cultural dividend across multiple years is significant. Companies that build cross-country mobility into their HR development pipeline produce leaders who can operate globally and translate principles into local context credibly.
The other discipline is country-specific compliance review. Labor law, ER procedures, and benefits requirements vary substantially across geographies. Companies that run quarterly compliance reviews by country catch issues early; companies that wait for an audit pay much more to fix the same issues later.
One additional move worth highlighting: structured peer learning across countries. Setting up regular calls where HRBPs from different geographies share what is working in their context produces practical knowledge that central HR cannot generate alone. The peer network is also where local leaders learn how to push back on global directives that do not fit their context, which protects the organization from making decisions that look right at headquarters and fail in the field.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Merary’s argument is operational: global culture is built through consistent operating practices, not consistent talking points. The teams that ship this well invest in HRBP capability, standardize tooling globally, and treat change management as a core discipline.
For People teams running global work, the move is to map which practices are core and which are situational, build the operating cadence to match, and instrument the system through ER and engagement signal that captures cross-country variance early. The compounding effect across multiple geographies and multiple years is what produces durable global culture.
See how AllVoices helps People teams turn workplace signals into action.
.png)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)