In this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we spoke with Karis Jones, VP of Human Resources at Good American and SKIMS. Karis has built her career inside fast-moving consumer brands, which means she has had to solve the innovation culture puzzle in an environment that does not tolerate the usual slow corporate cadence. Her approach is practical and data-informed, and it offers a useful template for HR leaders trying to do the same in very different industries.
The thread through her work is that a culture of innovation is not about brainstorming sessions or fun office design. It is about whether employees believe they can propose something, test it, and be judged fairly on the result. If the answer is no, the rest of the innovation infrastructure does not matter. If the answer is yes, small companies can outrun larger ones.
What a Culture of Innovation Actually Looks Like
A culture of innovation is the set of practices that make it safe and efficient for employees to try something that might not work. It covers psychological safety, decision-making speed, feedback quality, and the way the organization responds when a bet does not pay off.
The research on this is well established. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety in resilient organizations shows that teams with higher psychological safety take more interpersonal risks, surface more honest feedback, and produce more useful learning from failed experiments. Innovation culture is built on this foundation, and every other tactic depends on it.
For HR leaders, that means the highest-impactful innovation investment is often in manager coaching on psychological safety rather than in innovation programs themselves. Safe teams innovate. Unsafe teams do not, regardless of the programs offered to them.
Supporting research from HBS Online on psychological safety in the workplace echoes the same pattern. Teams that explicitly invite participation, frame work as learning, and respond productively to honest feedback consistently produce better outcomes than teams that do not, even when the teams are technically comparable. The gap compounds over time, which is why innovation cultures tend to be either strong and getting stronger or weak and getting weaker.
How Innovation Culture Shows Up in Practice
What does a healthy innovation culture look like at the team level?
Teams that can openly discuss what is not working, that treat disconfirming data as useful, and that celebrate learning as much as outcomes. Managers who ask more questions than they answer. A steady rhythm of small experiments rather than a single annual innovation push.
How do you tell if your innovation culture is broken?Listen for what employees say when something fails. If the dominant language is about blame, the culture is not innovating, even if the marketing materials say otherwise. If the dominant language is about learning and next steps, the culture is healthy regardless of the last outcome.
Karis pointed out that innovation culture is especially vulnerable during rapid growth. Teams that doubled headcount in a year often lose the psychological safety that made them innovate in the first place, because the norms get diluted. Preserving culture during growth requires explicit onboarding on how the team actually works, not just on the company mission.
The HR function can help here by institutionalizing the behaviors that define the culture. Simple tools like team charters, retrospective templates, and a documented failure analysis practice are inexpensive ways to keep the culture intact as the population changes.
What Actually Works for Building Innovation Culture
Principle 1: Invest in psychological safety at the manager level
Most innovation programs fail at the team layer, which is where experiments actually happen. Manager coaching on how to run team meetings, how to respond to failure, and how to invite dissent produces more innovation lift than any centralized program.
Principle 2: Shorten the feedback loop
Innovation requires fast feedback. Annual performance reviews are too slow to support innovation culture. Weekly or biweekly check-ins, pulse measurement through lightweight pulse surveys, and rapid retrospectives all compress the cycle and make the culture more responsive.
Principle 3: Treat failure analysis as a standing practice
Teams that learn from failure do it deliberately. Build a simple retrospective practice into the rhythm: what did we try, what did we learn, what are we doing next. Make it normal, not exceptional.
Another practical point: managers who model curiosity accelerate innovation more than managers who model certainty. That reverses a lot of traditional management training. The most innovative teams tend to have leaders who ask good questions, acknowledge what they do not know, and treat the team's insights as real input rather than ratification.
Treat organizational culture data and ER patterns as two halves of the same signal, and use a defined ER operating model to close the loop when early signs of strain appear.
Where Employee Relations Fits
ER might seem distant from innovation culture, but it is closer than most HR leaders assume. Teams with unresolved interpersonal conflict do not innovate, because the energy goes into navigation rather than creation. Strong case management paired with a culture-focused operating model keeps those issues from quietly corroding team performance.
ER drill-down: connecting case patterns to innovation outcomes
Teams with consistently high case volume tend to produce less innovation per quarter than teams with lower, well-managed case volume. That pattern is worth tracking, because it gives HR leaders a way to tie ER investment to business outcomes beyond compliance. Innovation leaders often do not realize how much their output is shaped by the quality of conflict resolution happening below them.
Frequently Asked Questions About Innovation Culture
Is innovation culture the same in every industry?The principles are consistent, but the specific tactics differ. Regulated industries often need explicit guardrails around what can be experimented on. Consumer brands often need faster cycles. The underlying psychological safety work travels across contexts.Does innovation culture require a flat organization?No. Hierarchical organizations can have strong innovation cultures if leaders at each level practice psychological safety with their direct reports. The shape of the org chart matters less than the behavior of the managers inside it.How do you measure innovation culture?Combine engagement items on psychological safety, velocity metrics from the product or operations team, and qualitative data from retrospectives. Innovation culture is multi-dimensional, and a single metric will usually mislead.What is the biggest killer of innovation culture?Punishing the team that ran an experiment that did not succeed. One visible punishment can set back a team's innovation practice for years, because it signals that the official language about experimentation is not to be trusted.How does remote work change innovation culture?It raises the importance of deliberate practice. Remote teams lose the informal hallway conversations that often carried innovation in office environments. The teams that replace those conversations with structured, psychologically safe meetings produce comparable or better innovation. The ones that do not usually see innovation fade.The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
How do you measure innovation culture?Combine engagement items on psychological safety, velocity metrics from the product or operations team, and qualitative data from retrospectives. Innovation culture is multi-dimensional, and a single metric will usually mislead.What is the biggest killer of innovation culture?Punishing the team that ran an experiment that did not succeed. One visible punishment can set back a team's innovation practice for years, because it signals that the official language about experimentation is not to be trusted.How does remote work change innovation culture?It raises the importance of deliberate practice. Remote teams lose the informal hallway conversations that often carried innovation in office environments. The teams that replace those conversations with structured, psychologically safe meetings produce comparable or better innovation. The ones that do not usually see innovation fade.The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
How does remote work change innovation culture?It raises the importance of deliberate practice. Remote teams lose the informal hallway conversations that often carried innovation in office environments. The teams that replace those conversations with structured, psychologically safe meetings produce comparable or better innovation. The ones that do not usually see innovation fade.The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Karis's perspective from fast-moving consumer brands is a useful benchmark even for HR leaders in different industries. The pattern is consistent: innovation culture is built at the team level, depends on manager capability, and requires a faster feedback rhythm than most HR functions are used to supporting.
HR leaders who want to strengthen innovation culture should spend less time on the innovation theater and more time on the manager coaching, operating rhythms, and ER patterns that quietly shape whether teams can actually take risks. The work is less visible and more effective, which is a familiar pattern in HR.
Organizations that get this right can outrun bigger competitors, because innovation culture compounds. Teams that feel safe to experiment build on each other's learning. Teams that do not end up running the same plays, year after year.
See how AllVoices supports the manager coaching and case data that quietly shape innovation culture.
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